Comment by latentsea
6 hours ago
They aren't "Just as accurate". What you see with these quants is the providers only ever show performance on already saturated benchmarks. You'll see labs put out 1-bit quants Deepseek v4.1 claiming only 1% degradation because they're only showing the benchmarks which tell that story. Then you look at the performance on those same benchmarks for significantly weaker models like Qwen3.8-27B even and it's virtually the same because that benchmark is saturated.
I like these quants as much as the next guy when they're all I can run but I have both R9700 with 32GB VRAM and a 5060 Ti with only 16GB VRAM and so I run both Q6 Unlsoth quants and ISTA IQ3_XXS quants and yeah there is an absolute world of difference in realworld performance.
IMHO I think it's pretty scummy behavior from the quant providers to frame these quants this way. Just be honest about where the degradation is really occurring on the non-saturated benchmarks.
This is a really good point that goes the other way as well. Some use cases are great for smaller and cheaper models, but it's not obviously when that's the case so I can bank the savings.
Very much so. Probably a lot of compute is being wasted on using SOTA models for tasks that can be done on way, way weaker models.
All I know is that Strata and these models are the most I have ever gotten out of my machine. I get 70 t/s on a standard gaming rig 9070 XT / 5900X / 64 GB DDR4 @3400.
Yeah, they're surprisingly usable eventually. What I found running the Qwen3.8-Flash-Next IQ3_XXS on CUDA kernel development was, sure it generated faster t/s than 27B dense, but it generated so many more bugs, and when the quantization is lower the reasoning traces get longer. It was more or less always able to figure out what bugs it had made and fix them, but it took quite a lot of time to do. I switched back to Q6 on the dense model and that just went away for the most part. I recently upgraded to 128GB system RAM so that I can up to Q5 on Flash Next. Really excited for Qwen4-Flash when it comes out. Gonna be a real beast.