I Tried Running MiniMax H3 on a 12GB Card. Here's What Actually Happened

<p>Saw the <a href="https://www.minimax.io/" rel="noopener noreferrer">MiniMax</a> H3 open-weight release and, being the kind of person who has to find out the hard way, decided to see if my modest 12GB card could actually run it — since ComfyUI's own docs suggested that's the floor with CPU offloading.<br> <a href="https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=800%2Cheight=%2Cfit=scale-down%2Cgravity=auto%2Cformat=auto/https%3A%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Farticles%2Fpm78775mzdy1l5csqb9u.png" class="article-body-image-wrapper"><img src="https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=800%2Cheight=%2Cfit=scale-down%2Cgravity=auto%2Cformat=auto/https%3A%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Farticles%2Fpm78775mzdy1l5csqb9u.png" alt=" " width="800" height="336"></a><br> Before I go further, the disclaimer that matters more than my results: the license reportedly excludes the EU, UK, South Korea, and the US from its applicable territory. I checked where I fall before touching any of this — if you're following along, do that first, not after you've already downloaded 40+ gigabytes.</p> <p>What I actually did: grabbed the fl2va checkpoint (text/image-driven, since that's the more common use case), which came in around 21GB in its smallest form — already more than double my available VRAM. Set up CPU offloading per ComfyUI's guidance and gave it a simple image-to-video prompt.</p> <p>What happened: it ran. It did not run fast. A generation that I'd guess takes a reasonable amount of time on proper hardware took long enough on mine that I started a load of laundry and it wasn't done when I got back. Output quality, for the one clip I let finish, was genuinely impressive for a locally-run open model — native audio generation included, which is the detail that actually surprised me since I'd expected to need a separate step for that.</p> <p>What I'd tell someone else considering this on similar hardware: it's possible, not comfortable. If you want to actually experiment iteratively — try a prompt, tweak it, try again — a 12GB card with offloading is going to test your patience. If you just want to confirm the model can run locally and produce one or two real outputs to evaluate quality, it's a reasonable Saturday-afternoon project. If you need this for actual production iteration speed, you're looking at needing considerably more VRAM or accepting the API-hosted path for the layers that stay hosted anyway.</p> <p>TL;DR: Ran MiniMax H3's fl2va checkpoint on a 12GB card with CPU offloading — it worked, output quality was genuinely good including native audio, but generation speed was slow enough that this is an "evaluate the model" setup, not a "rapid iteration" one. Check the license's territory exclusions before you start downloading, not after.<br> web：<a href="//www.fastrouteai.com">www.fastrouteai.com</a></p>