The original release was full precision model weights running in an old version of PyTorch with no optimizations. Fast forward to now and you have faster-whisp

The original release was full precision model weights running in an old version of PyTorch with no optimizations. Fast forward to now and you have faster-whisper (using Ctranslate2) and distil-whisper optimized weights. Between the two of them Whisper Large uses something like 1/8th the memory and is likely at least an order of magnitude faster on your hardware. German has no effect on these metrics and for accuracy it actually has a lower word error rate than English.