diff --git a/hw/dixie/default.nix b/hw/dixie/default.nix
index 2fbdb1e..7a21a63 100644
--- a/hw/dixie/default.nix
+++ b/hw/dixie/default.nix
@@ -51,13 +51,14 @@ let
     model = ${modelsDir}/qwen3-embedding-0.6b/Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B-Q8_0.gguf
     embedding = true
     pooling = cls
-    ; A whole input must fit in one physical batch AND one slot. batch-size defaults to 2048
-    ; and silently caps ubatch, and ctx is split across slots, so both were 2048 in practice:
-    ; Honcho's longer messages (up to its 8192-token EMBEDDING.MAX_INPUT_TOKENS) failed with
-    ; "input is too large to process". Size all three to 8192 per slot.
-    batch-size = 8192
-    ubatch-size = 8192
-    ctx-size = 16384
+    ; A whole input must fit in one physical batch AND one slot (batch-size silently caps
+    ; ubatch; ctx is split across slots). Bigger batches cost compute buffers fast on a
+    ; shared 12 GB card: 8192/slot took 6.6 GB and 4096/slot did not fit beside the 9B and
+    ; dialectic. So 2048/slot here, and rift's EMBEDDING_MAX_INPUT_TOKENS=1536 makes Honcho
+    ; chunk below that (its token estimate is not Qwen's tokenizer, hence the margin).
+    batch-size = 2048
+    ubatch-size = 2048
+    ctx-size = 4096
     parallel = 2
   '';