Gemma 4 31B Crushes Qwen 3.6 27B in Local Gamedev Benchmark — 5x Fewer Tokens, Working Game

r/LocalLLaMA·medium signal

A head-to-head comparison on M5 Max MacBook Pro (64GB RAM) shows Gemma 4 31B producing a working Pac-Man game in 3m 51s with 6,209 tokens, while Qwen 3.6 27B took 18m 04s and 33,946 tokens (482 upvotes, 114 comments). Despite lower tok/s (27 vs 32), Gemma's dramatically better code efficiency resulted in a functional game versus Qwen's failure. This challenges the 'bigger is better' assumption for practical coding tasks.