Open source AI is actually moving at an unhinged... pace right now. I literally hadn't even finished typing up my last Gemma 4 12b benchmark notes before Google went ahead and dropped the official Quantization Aware Training (QAT) checkpoints on Hugging Face. If you missed the news, QAT basically bakes the compression directly into the training process. Instead of standard post training quantization degrading the model's reasoning capabilities, QAT trains the model with compression in mind. Unsloth is reporting near original performance at 4-bit with ~72% lower memory footprint. Details in the comments. Naturally, had to instantly pull the new GGUFs to see what a single RTX 4090 card (24 GB VRAM, Cuda 12.8, ubuntu 22) could do. i fired up llama.cpp engine again Look at these numbers: 1. Unsloth Gemma 4 26B-A4B IT (QAT Q4_K_XL) flags: ./build/bin/llama-cli -m gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf -cnv -ngl 99 -c 250000 -fa on -v VRAM Used: 19.5 GB context: 250,000 tokens decode throughput: 193 tps 2. Unsloth Gemma 4 31B IT (QAT Q4_K_XL) flags: Command: ./build/bin/llama-cli -m gemma-4-31B-it-qat-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf -cnv -ngl 99 -c 60000 -fa on -v - VRAM Used: 23 GB (Tight, but zero system RAM spillover) - context: 60,000 tokens - decode throughput: 47 tps We are essentially watching hardware bottlenecks evaporate in real time. An update literally drops before you can finish benchmarking the previous one. What a time to be running local hardware. If you have a single rtx 3090, rtx 4090, these are the latest gemma models to try this week.show more

If you thought the Gemma 4 31B (dense) model... was fast, sit down. I just benched the updated Gemma 4 26B A4B MoE on a single RTX 4090 (24 GB VRAM) 9,200 t/s prefill. 160 t/s decode. 250,000 context window. All on a single consumer RTX 4090. The numbers are completely unhinged. The 31B is a dense behemoth. But the 26B is a Mixture of Experts (MoE), specifically an Active 4 Billion (A4B). It holds 26B parameters of knowledge but only activates 4B per token. Because its inference memory footprint is so light, I didn’t even need KV cache quantization to hit a quarter million context. Compiled the latest llama.cpp from source on Ubuntu 22 (CUDA 13). Fed it a 28k token prompt, and manually cranked the batch sizes (-b 2048 -ub 2048) to absolutely redline the Tensor Cores. Here is the benchmarking breakdown: # 1. The Baseline (No MTP) Even without speculative decoding, the A4B architecture flies. llama.cpp flags: ./build/bin/llama-server -m gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf -c 250000 -ngl 99 -fa on -b 2048 -ub 2048 --port 8080 -v Context Ceiling: 250,000 tokens (21.5 GB VRAM) Prefill: 9,200 t/s (Absurd) Decode: 124 t/s # 2. The MTP Overdrive Injected the new MTP draft model to enable Speculative Decoding. llama.cpp flags: ./build/bin/llama-server -m gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf --spec-type draft-mtp --spec-draft-model mtp-gemma-4-26B-A4B-it.gguf --spec-draft-n-max 4 --spec-draft-p-min 0.7 -c 250000 -ngl 99 -fa on -b 2048 -ub 2048 --port 8080 -v Context Ceiling: 250,000 tokens (22.96 GB VRAM) Prefill: 7,054 t/s (MTP draft overhead slightly caps prefill) Decode: 156 t/s # The Agentic Architecture Insight Why does this matter? Because you can now build a killer local agentic loop on a consumer desktop. Use the 31B dense model (from the previous post) as your heavy, deliberate Orchestrator / Verifier / Planner. Pass the actual execution tasks to this 26B MoE. At 160 t/s, this MoE can chew through code generation, tool calling, and massive RAG document retrieval over a 250k context window almost instantly, drastically speeding up your agentic loop. If you own a single RTX 3090 or 4090 and haven't tried this specific stack yet, you need to pull these latest updates and run it. Local inference just leveled up. Hugging Face links to the Unsloth 26B QAT quants and MTP drafters are in the replies. performance graphs also available in the replies.show more

Run Gemma 4 26B MoE on 8GB VRAM with... 250k context at 20+ tokens/sec If you own any 8GB VRAM graphics card, stop what you are doing. Local AI just had its absolute "Holy Shit" moment for budget hardware. Yesterday, I benchmarked Unsloth Gemma 4 12B Q4_K_XL on an 8GB card. The community went wild but immediately demanded more: "Can we run a 25B+ model on budget GPUs?" Today, I’m delivering exactly that. I am running a massive 26B parameter Mixture of Experts (MoE) model locally on a standard 8GB VRAM setup with 250k full native context!. If you own an RTX 3060, 3070, 4060, or any budget GPU with 8GB of VRAM, the local AI paradigm has completely changed. The performance metrics are astonishing: - 20 tokens/sec flat decode throughput. - Stable, flat decode speed even with massive prompts. - I threw a 60k token prompt at it, and it still clocked in at 20 TPS without dropping a single frame. # What about prefill? Yes, Time To First Token (TTFT) is slightly high when swallowing massive contexts. But with a solid 200 tokens/sec prefill speed, the wait is barely noticeable and highly usable. And this is running completely without Multi Token Prediction (MTP) active. How is this possible? It’s the magic of Google's new QAT (Quantization Aware Training) quants for Gemma 4. The model weight file (unsloth gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf) is only 13.2 GB, making it the ultimate local powerhouse. # The Test Setup: CPU: Intel Core i7 RAM: 16GB System RAM GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU (8GB VRAM) # The Secret Sauce (The -cmoe Flag) To make this work properly on any 8GB card, you must use the -cmoe (CPU MoE) flag in llama.cpp. This flag isolates the heavy MoE expert weights directly to system memory (CPU/RAM) while letting your GPU focus strictly on the Attention layers and the KV Cache. It prevents VRAM spillage and holds the throughput rock solid. # The flags: -m "gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf" -cmoe -c 248000 -v Once running, just open the UI on localhost and toggle the new reasoning lightbulb icon in the text input box to watch the model perform multi step thinking. Are you still running smaller models, or are you ready to scale up your budget local setups? Let's discuss in the repliesshow more

my 8 GB VRAM gaming laptop is absolutely going... to hate me for this. but I still did it. ran a 31b dense model (Gemma 4 31b Q4) with only 8 GB VRAM last week I ran Gemma 4 26B A4B a mixture of experts model on my RTX 4060 and hit 25–28 tokens/sec using llama.cpp's new MTP support. smooth. snappy. but MoE has a secret: it only activates 4B parameters per token despite having 26B total. that's why it flies. so the real question started haunting me. what if I throw a full, no tricks, every parameter fires on every token, 31B DENSE model at the same machine? # Hardware: GPU: NVIDIA RTX 4060, 8 GB VRAM RAM: 16 GB CPU: Intel Core i7 H Laptop. Gaming. Modest. The model: gemma-4-31B-it-qat-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf (model's unsloth huggingface link in the comments) This is Google DeepMind's flagship dense model in the Gemma 4 family that can run on single consumer GPU. It packs a hybrid attention architecture, supports up to 256K context natively, and is QAT (Quantization Aware Training) optimized, meaning it retains far more quality than standard post training quants at the same bit depth. This is NOT the MoE. This is 31 BILLION dense parameters, every single one of them loaded. # the flags I used: -m gemma-4-31B-it-qat-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf -cnv --spec-type draft-mtp --spec-draft-model mtp-gemma-4-31B-it.gguf --spec-draft-n-max 8 --spec-draft-p-min 0.6 -c 6000 -v Multi Token Prediction (MTP) is still active here. Separate draft GGUF required, same as the 26B setup. # Results: → Decode: ~3 tokens/sec → Prefill: ~2 tokens/sec → Context: 6000 tokens → Hardware crying quietly in the corner: yes so is 3 tps actually usable? For real time back and forth chat? Not ideal. You're not having a fluid conversation at 3 tps. but slow ≠ useless. And this is where it gets genuinely interesting. think about how senior devs actually work in a real team. But when something is architectural, deeply complex, or needs serious reasoning? they walk down the hall and escalate to the senior. That's exactly the local AI agent architecture this unlocks: → Fast orchestrator model (Gemma 4 26B MoE at 25+ tps) handles routing, simple queries, tool calls, memory. The junior dev. → Gemma 4 31B dense is the senior, called only when the fast model genuinely hits a wall. Hard multi step reasoning. Complex code generation. Deep architectural decisions. The agentic loop stays fast. Only the hard hops touch the 31B. That's a legitimate production grade local AI architecture on a budget hardware. (requires 2 8gb gpus) other workflows where 3 tps is completely fine: - overnight batch jobs. summarize documents, extract structured data, review code. Fire it off. Sleep. wake up to results. - One shot deep reasoning - Silent code audit loops, you write and test, the 31B reviews diffs and flags issues in the background between your sprints - Any workflow where output quality > output speed A few weeks ago, nobody was running a 30B+ dense model on a single consumer GPU with 8 GB VRAM. At all. Now we're doing it on an Intel i7-H gaming laptop with a NVIDIA RTX 4060, thanks to llama.cpp + QAT quants + MTP speculative drafting. Google DeepMind said the Gemma 4 31B targets "consumer GPUs and workstations." They were not exaggerating. The hardware bar to run serious frontier class models locally keeps dropping. the tools are here. the models are here. you just have to be willing to abuse your laptop a little. what workflows would you actually run on a local 3 tps 31B dense model? genuinely curious. drop it below.show more

Gemma 4 12B QAT (dense) achieves 1000+ tokens/sec prefill... on 8GB VRAM with 120k context Gemma 4 12B QAT (dense), TurboQuant (Without MTP), RTX 4060 8GB VRAM: Prefill: 1000+ tok/s (42% increase) Decode: 25+ tok/s (25% increase) Context: 120k (150% increase) prefill was 700 tok/sec and decode 20 tok/sec with only 48k context without turbo quant (older test with mtp link in the comments) llama.cpp TurboQuant flags: -m gemma-4-12B-it-qat-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf -c 120000 --cache-type-k q8_0 --cache-type-v turbo3 -ngl 99 --port 8080 tested with a 27k prompt, 120k context loaded. -ngl 99 here isn't a typo, full 12B dense, every layer on GPU, on an 8GB card. that's the part worth sitting with. The model has vision, audio input, thinking/reasoning and fits your 8GB card. TurboQuant's KV cache savings are what free up the room to do that at 120k context. side by side with yesterday: 26B A4B MoE got 320+ tok/s prefill. this dense 12B is clearing 1000+ rig: RTX 4060 8GB · i7H · 16GB RAM same two flags as yesterday, different model size: --cache-type-k q8_0 --cache-type-v turbo3 thanks to TheTom/llama-cpp-turboquant, TurboQuant fork of llama.cpp by Tom Turney (Tom Turney) to make this work. unsloth's model quant huggingface and the llama.cpp fork github link in the comments Do you prefer a dense or a MoE for your 8GB card?show more

you're paying $20/mo for something your $500 GPU can... already do. Gemma 4 26B A4B QAT MoE + Hermes Agent running on a single RTX 4060 (8GB VRAM). Built a vision capable, 100% free, 100% local, private AI assistant that lives in my Chrome browser. No API keys. No cloud. No subscriptions. 100% vibe coded. 0% handholding. It has full context of whatever's on my screen can answer questions, summarize pages, extract data, and see images. Same local model handles everything, no external calls, ever. keep reading for the model and hermes agent tips i learnt while building this locally. Here's the exact setup for anyone running local LLMs on 6-8 GB VRAM: llama.cpp server flags (on my NVIDIA RTX 4060 8gb VRAM): -m gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf --cache-type-k q8_0 --cache-type-v q8_0 -c 150000 --port 8080 Throughput with quantization: Prefill: 200-250 tokens/sec Decode: 20-25 tokens/sec reduce context if oom on 6 gb vram card. Key learnings: - Quantize KV cache to q8 for faster prefill/decode. Prefill goes from 100-150 (unquantized) to 200-250 tok/s (q8). - But watch out, once actual context grows past ~50k tokens on high entropy workloads, q8 KV quantization can cause hallucinations. Low entropy workloads are mostly unaffected. If you see it happening, drop the quantization. This is common across all local models. - In Hermes Agent settings -> Memory & Context, bump compression threshold from default 0.5 to 0.7. Default triggers way too frequent context compression and eats time. Up next: add persistent memory, web search, tool calling, streaming output and whatever you suggest. Running a 26B MoE with vision + 150k context window on 8GB VRAM would've sounded impossible 6 months ago. Works the same on the NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti, 3070, 4060 Ti, 5060, 2080, or any 8GB card. VRAM is the only requirement. Local AI agents are closer than people think. You just need to know where the knobs are. Model's Unsloth quant hugging face link in the comments. Have you tried Hermes agent by Nous Research yet? What are you building with local LLMs? Drop it below, let's see what this community is shipping.show more

I told you to claim your free 16GB NVIDIA... GPU for learning Local LLMs. Now I’m going to show you how to double its inference speed without touching the hardware. Google Colab gives you an enterprise grade NVIDIA Tesla T4 GPU for free, roughly 4 hours every single day. It is the absolute perfect sandbox for learning AI engineering, testing inference flags, and pushing massive context windows. The local AI timeline is moving way too fast. If you aren't using Multi Token Prediction (MTP) yet, you are leaving massive performance on the table. I just pushed DeepMind’s Gemma 4 26B to 64.9 t/s on this exact free tier. Let's look at the raw benchmark data running on an Ubuntu Linux environment with the latest compiled llama.cpp binaries and quantized GGUFs from Unsloth via HuggingFace: # Qwen 3.5 9B (Dense): Base: [ Prompt: 626.7 t/s | Generation: 21.0 t/s ] With MTP: [ Prompt: 539.1 t/s | Generation: 24.8 t/s ] # Gemma 4 26B QAT (MoE): Base: [ Prompt: 634.2 t/s | Generation: 48.3 t/s ] With MTP: [ Prompt: 572.1 t/s | Generation: 64.9 t/s ] If you are paying attention, this single Colab notebook reveals 3 massive observations about the current state of local LLMs: # 1. The MTP Speedup (Software Overclocking) Standard autoregressive decoding guesses one token at a time. MTP acts like a highly optimized, built in speculative decoder. It predicts multiple future tokens at once and the main model verifies them in parallel. The result? Zero accuracy loss and a massive throughput increase. Gemma jumped from 48 to 65 t/s just by flipping a flag. # 2. The MoE Paradox (Bigger is Faster) How does a 26B parameter model absolutely destroy a 9B model in raw speed on the exact same hardware? Architecture. Qwen 3.5 9B is a dense model. it activates all 9 billion parameters for every single token. Gemma 4 26B is a Mixture of Experts (MoE) model. It routes data efficiently, activating only 4B parameters per token. You get the reasoning capabilities of a 26B model with the compute cost of a 4B model. 3. Thinking Efficiency When I ran the exact same complex prompt on both models, the larger MoE spent significantly fewer "thinking" tokens to arrive at the correct answer. A smarter model doesn't just give better answers; it gets to the point faster, saving you compute cycles and preserving your context window. # Want to run this yourself? Here are the exact llama.cpp CLI commands. For Qwen (MTP is baked into the main model): ./llama-cli -m Qwen3.5-9B-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf -p "Explain quantum computing." -n 2000 -c 8000 -ngl 99 -fa on --spec-type draft-mtp --spec-draft-n-max 4 --spec-draft-p-min 0.7 For Gemma (Using a separate lightweight draft model): ./llama-cli -m gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf --model-draft mtp-gemma-4-26B-A4B-it.gguf -p "Explain quantum computing." -n 2000 -c 8000 -ngl 99 -fa on --spec-type draft-mtp --spec-draft-n-max 4 --spec-draft-p-min 0.7 Stop waiting for a $3,000 rig. Boot up Colab, pull these models, and start building your stack. I’ve put together a completely free, cell by cell Google Colab notebook that automates this entire workflow so you can test it yourself in 5 minutes and learn. Link to the notebook is in the comments below. Experiemt with different MTP parameters, context windows and post your results in the comments.show more

Gemma 4 26B A4B MoE - 500+ t/s decode... - Single RTX 4090 (24 GB VRAM) - Llama.cpp concurrency 24 - q8 kv cache How many API users can you simultaneously host on a single RTX 4090 (24 GB VRAM) before it crashes? Yesterday, I proved you can host 14 active users using unquantized memory. Today, I used 8 bit KV Cache Quantization to hack the VRAM footprint. I successfully scaled to 24 concurrent users without a single dropped connection. A 71% server capacity boost for free. By adding the -ctk q8_0 -ctv q8_0 flags to llama.cpp, you compress the KV cache context memory from 16 bit to 8 bit. This unlocks massive concurrency limits on Gemma 4 26B (MoE) on a single 24GB consumer GPU. Here is the exact telemetry from pushing 8 bit quantization to its absolute physical edge: # TEST 1: The 24 User Concurrency Max Server Config: 24 slots (np 24) | 4,096 context per slot | 98,304 Total Context Client Load: 24 simultaneous requests (2,000 token prompt per user) Unquantized KV cache for this load requires 28GB+ VRAM (Instant OOM). Quantized to Q8, it allocated safely at 23.35 GB. The C++ engine crunched the entire batch in 28.5 seconds. Decode Speed: 21 t/s (Per User) | 500 t/s (Agg) # TEST 2: The 48 User Queue Overload What happens to a compressed cache during a traffic spike? Server Config: 24 slots (np 24) | 4,096 context per slot | 98,304 Total Context Client Load: 48 simultaneous requests (2k token prompt per user) Zero queue drops. The scheduler flushed and hot swapped the 8 bit memory flawlessly on the fly, completing all 48 users in 66.0 seconds (a perfect 2.3x queue scaling multiplier). Decode Speed: 18 t/s (Per User) | 430 t/s (Agg) # TEST 3: The 8 User RAG Slam Server Config: 8 slots (np 8) | 60,000 context per slot | 480,000 Total Context Client Load: 8 simultaneous requests (30k token prompt per user) It allocated 23.83 GB VRAM and chewed through ~240,000 prefill tokens in 46 seconds under massive memory pressure. Prefill Speed: 6,200 t/s (Agg) Decode Speed: 22 t/s (Per User) | 175 t/s (Agg) # The Engineering Alpha (The Quantization Tradeoff): You gain a massive 71% increase in server capacity, but what do you lose? Compute latency. Because the cache is stored in 8 bit, the GPU's cores have to dequantize the memory back to 16 bit on the fly during every single prefill step. In my unquantized tests yesterday, single slot prefill was hitting ~1,500+ t/s. Today, under the heavy 48-user Q8 load, prefill dropped as low as ~750 t/s. You trade a few seconds of initial prefill latency to essentially double your API hosting capacity. For production high volume SaaS, this is the ultimate unit economics cheat code. Here is the exact command to run a 24 user Q8 continuous batching server on your own single 4090, single 3090 or any 24gb vram rig: ./build/bin/llama-server -m gemma-4-26B-A4B-it.gguf -c 98304 -np 24 -b 2048 -ub 2048 -ngl 99 -fa on -ctk q8_0 -ctv q8_0 --port 8080 (Note: -c 98304 allocates exactly 4,096 tokens of context per user across 24 slots). Hugging Face links to the Unsloth Gemma 4 26B QAT quants along with performance graphs available in the replies. Would you trade 3 seconds of Time To First Token latency to double your active user capacity?show more

Muse Glimmer, A 30B parameter dense model swallowing a... 130,000 token context window using only 19.3 GB of VRAM (extreme efficiency). No KV cache quantization required. I just benched the new Muse Glimmer 30B (dense) on a single RTX 4090. We are pulling 3,100+ t/s prefill and 75 tokens/second decode. The throughput is violent. Meta superintelligence lab just open sourced this agentic beast, explicitly engineered to dominate 24GB consumer cards. I pulled the latest llama.cpp source on Ubuntu 22 (CUDA 13) to see if the specs were real. Fed it a 28k token prompt. Here is the exact llama.cpp God Stack and benchmarking breakdown: # 1. The Deep Context Run (No Speculative Decoding) The architecture uses a massive 16:1 GQA (Grouped Query Attention) ratio. This means the KV cache footprint is practically non existent. ./build/bin/llama-server -m Muse-Glimmer-30B-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf -c 130000 -b 4096 -ub 4096 -ngl 99 --port 8080 Prefill: 3134.95 t/s Decode: 50.00 t/s VRAM: 19.34 GB (I hit 130k context on pristine, unquantized f16 cache and still had 4.5 GB of VRAM left over. Absolute witchcraft). # 2. The DFlash Speculative Overdrive Meta shipped this with a DFlash block diffusion drafter. Let's trade that extra VRAM for pure speed. ./build/bin/llama-server -m Muse-Glimmer-30B-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf -md dflash-kquant.gguf --spec-type draft-dflash --spec-draft-n-max 3 -c 80000 -b 4096 -ub 4096 -ngl 99 --port 8080 Prefill: 1293.69 t/s Decode: 75.00 t/s VRAM: 23.93 GB (Maxed out on card) the dflash gguf is additional 1.6 GBs # The Architecture Insight (Muse Glimmer vs. Gemma 4 31B) If you look at my Gemma 4 31B tests from last week, getting 140k context required heavily degrading the memory with Q4 KV quantization (gemma 31b q4 can do only about 40k context with unquantized kv on a 24gb card). That "unzipping" overhead bottlenecked Gemma's MTP decode speeds down to 65 t/s. Muse Glimmer completely sidesteps this bottleneck. By using aggressive 16:1 GQA, it keeps the KV cache in native f16 format at massive context lengths. Flash Attention gets to run at maximum uncompressed speed, letting the DFlash drafter push decode safely to 75 t/s without compute lag. With a 76% on SWE Bench Verified and seamless local tool calling, this model looks promising. Unsloth's Hugging Face GGUF links, intelligence/agentic benchmark details, and inference throughput performance graphs are posted in the replies. For 24GB rig, what’s your current go to model?show more

the 24gb vram tier is enough for most builder... work in 2026. gemma 4 31b dense on my rog scar 18 just autonomously built a production hero section in one prompt, one html file and 5 minutes end to end. hardware: rog scar 18, rtx 5090 laptop 24gb vram. model: google gemma 4 31b dense at q4_k_m quant, using 22.8 of 24gb. engine: llama.cpp built for blackwell (sm_120). harness: hermes agent with native tool parsing. speed: 15 tok/s sustained, 94 watts, 50c. flags i used: ./build/bin/llama-server -m ~/models/gemma4-31b/google_gemma-4-31B-it-Q4_K_M.gguf -ngl 99 -c 131072 -np 1 -fa on --cache-type-k q4_0 --cache-type-v q4_0 --jinja --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8080 if you own 24gb vram in 2026, you have enough for most ui work, most agentic coding, most autonomous builds. no subscription, no one logging your prompts. a dense open model on consumer hardware shipping real software on your desk. this was the warmup. full page next on same hardware, then the octopus invaders final multifile autonomous challenge.show more

Testing the new Gemma 4 12B (QAT) vision and... OCR capabilities locally with LM Studio. # The setup: - GPU: NVIDIA RTX 4060 (8GB VRAM) - CPU: Intel i7 - Runner: LM Studio - Config: 32k context, 38 layers offloaded, Flash Attention enabled - Speed: ~14 tokens/sec decode throughput # The test: I gave it a screenshot of Google AI Studio. Prompt: "clone this. give me a single html file" # The result: A solid one shot replication. It successfully mapped out the layout, recognized the UI text, and structured the divs correctly, with only minor differences from the original. Results available at the end of the video. Quite capable for a 12B model running on budget consumer hardware. A gpu that costs only $300. # Why the architecture under the hood is notable: Unlike traditional models that rely on heavy, separate vision and audio encoders, Gemma 4 12B uses a unified, encoder free architecture. It bypasses separate multi stage encoders. Uses a 35M parameter vision embedder to project raw 48x48 pixel patches directly to the LLM hidden dimension. Local multimodal development is becoming highly accessible on standard hardware. If you've spun up Gemma 4 12B locally, what setup are you using and what kind of throughput are you seeing?show more

Qwen 3.8 27B (dense) running on a single RTX... 4090 (24GB VRAM) at 65 tokens/sec decode with MTP! 260,000 context window or 65 tokens/sec decode with native MTP. The API cartel should be terrified. We are officially running frontier tier agentic AI (benchmarks comparable to claude opus 4.6 max) on a single consumer gaming GPU. I benchmarked Qwen3.8-27B on a single NVIDIA RTX 4090 (24GB VRAM, Ubuntu 22) using Unsloth’s Dynamic Q4_K_XL GGUF on the latest llama.cpp. Here is the complete benchmark breakdown across both Context Scaling and MTP Overdrive (28k prompt baseline): ### PART 1: The Context Scaling Matrix (Pure Throughput) # 1. Standard FP16 KV Cache (Unquantized): - 80k Context: 2,664.7 t/s prefill | 40.68 t/s decode | 22.36 GB VRAM - 100k Context: 2,678.7 t/s prefill | 40.89 t/s decode | 23.59 GB VRAM (100k is the hard ceiling for unquantized f16 KV in 24GB VRAM) # 2. Q8 Quantized KV Cache (-ctv q8_0 -ctk q8_0): - 130k Context: 2,639.1 t/s prefill | 40.96 t/s decode | 22.18 GB VRAM - 170k Context: 2,653.9 t/s prefill | 40.70 t/s decode | 23.68 GB VRAM (170k is the sweet spot for heavy agentic coding workflows) # 3. Q4 Quantized KV Cache (-ctv q4_0 -ctk q4_0): - 260k Context: 2,659.8 t/s prefill | 40.70 t/s decode | 23.00 GB VRAM Full 262k native context residing entirely in 24GB VRAM. Zero system RAM offload. Stress test with a monster 142k real-world prompt (-c 170000, Q8 KV): - Prefill: 1,829.50 tokens/s - Decode: 31.3 tokens/s - VRAM: 23.7 GB rock solid ### PART 2: Native MTP Overdrive (Trading Context for Speed) Since MTP heads are baked into the architecture, enabling native speculative drafting pushes decode speeds straight to 60 t/s with zero external draft model: # 1. MTP + Q8 KV Cache: - 80k Context: 2,370.66 t/s prefill | 59.25 t/s decode | 23.4 GB VRAM (MTP state buffers eat slightly more memory, making 80k the ceiling for Q8) # 2. MTP + Q4 KV Cache: - 130k Context: 2,391.09 t/s prefill | 60.10 t/s decode | 23.5 GB VRAM (Sweet spot: 130,000 context running at a screaming 60 tps decode) ### Qwen3.8-27B vs Muse Glimmer 30B Two days ago I benched Meta's Muse Glimmer 30B hitting 130k context unquantized (19.3 GB VRAM) pulling 50-75 t/s decode. If you own a single RTX 3090 or RTX 4090, you have zero excuse to burn API credits. ### The Reproduction llama.cpp flags: 1. Max Context Stack (260,000 Context @ 41 tps): ./build/bin/llama-server -m Qwen3.8-27B-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf -c 260000 -ngl 99 --port 8080 -ctv q4_0 -ctk q4_0 2. MTP Overdrive Stack (130,000 Context @ 60 tps): ./build/bin/llama-server -m Qwen3.8-27B-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf -c 130000 -ngl 99 --port 8080 -ctv q4_0 -ctk q4_0 --spec-type draft-mtp --spec-draft-n-max 4 --spec-draft-p-min 0.7 Unsloth's Hugging Face GGUF links, intelligence/agentic benchmark details, and performance charts are posted in the replies. Local compute is eating the cloud alive. How much monthly API spend does a 24GB setup like this actually replace for you?show more

Qwen 3.8 27B Q4_K_M - 90 tokens/sec on a... single NVIDIA RTX 4090 (24 GB VRAM) with Dflash2! (MTP 60 tps -> 90 tps Dflash2!!!!) Local AI moves so fast (literally!) it’s terrifying. Z lab just dropped DFlash 2 for Qwen 3.8 27b and Muse Glimmer. I patched llama.cpp (PR #27342) and paired it with Unsloth’s Qwen 3.8 27B UD-Q4_K_XL quant. The result? Lossless 90 tokens/s decode. My last post highlighted native MTP hitting 60 t/s at 130,000 context. But DFlash 2 just completely shattered that ceiling. By using parallel block diffusion drafting (predicting whole blocks of tokens in a single pass using dynamic convolutions), DFlash achieves a massive 5.39 token acceptance rate. THE ALPHA TWEAK: `n-max 7` eats too much VRAM for draft states. But if you drop the draft limit to `--spec-draft-n-max 4`, you slash the VRAM overhead and actually increase the throughput. Here is the new 24GB VRAM Physics Matrix (DFlash 2 @ n-max 4): - 30k Context: 1,725 t/s prefill | 87.05 t/s decode | 22.2 GB VRAM - 80k Context: 1,789 t/s prefill | 84.20 t/s decode | 23.3 GB VRAM - 110k Context: 1,767 t/s prefill | 83.35 t/s decode | 23.96 GB VRAM (110k context at 83+ tokens a second sitting exactly on the 24GB hardware limit is absolute wizardry). How to compile the PR today: git clone cd llama.cpp git fetch origin pull/27342/head:pr-27342 git switch pr-27342 cmake -B build -DGGML_CUDA=ON && cmake --build build -j Llama.cpp flags for Dflash (110k Context Ceiling): ./build/bin/llama-server -m Qwen3.8-27B-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf -md Qwen3.8-27B-DFlash2-Q4_K_M.gguf --spec-type draft-dflash --spec-draft-n-max 4 -c 110000 -ngl 99 --port 8080 -ctv q4_0 -ctk q4_0 The fact that the open source community is shipping block diffusion drafters so quickly that run entirely locally on a gaming GPU is unbelievable. If you own a single RTX 3090 or 4090, it is officially time to upgrade to qwen 3.8 27b with dflash 2 and cancel your API subscriptions and let local silicon eat the cloud. This model beats GPT 5.6 Terra, GLM 5.2 DeepSeek V4 Pro, Muse Spark 1.2 and Claude Opus 4.8 on the artificial analysis agentic index (details in the replies) Hugging Face GGUF links (Base + DFlash2) and the full visual VRAM scaling and Dflash2 vs MTP graphs are also in the replies below. are you sticking to native MTP for the 130k context, or sacrificing 20k context to redline your decode speed? How many tokens/sec are you pushing on your current local rig?show more

I just got Gemma 4 26B A4B MoE model... running fully locally with Hermes agent on an 8GB RTX 4060 and it's now backtesting trading strategies end to end, no hand holding. If you’re a trader or work on Wall Street, you don’t want to miss this. Yes. fully automated. No cloud. No APIs beyond market data. # Here's what I did: Setup: - Model: Gemma 4 26B-A4B QAT (MoE), Q4_K_XL Unsloth's quant (link in the comments) - Inference: llama.cpp (turboquant fork by Tom Turney link in the comments) - Hardware: RTX 4060, 8GB VRAM + 16GB RAM only (with 50 other chrome tabs open) - Context: 64K llama.cpp turboquant flags: -m gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf -c 64000 --cache-type-k q8_0 --cache-type-v turbo3 --port 8080 turboquant helps achieve high prefill and decode throughput for interactive sessions. throughput with Hermes agent: decode: 25+ tokens/sec prefill: 250+ tokens/sec # Then I gave the agent one task: Backtest a strategy: - Buy when RSI crosses above 30 - Sell at +2% profit or -1% stoploss - No overlapping positions - Use Google stock via yfinance - Generate a full HTML report with candlestick charts + signals What happened next was wild. It didn't just write code, it ran the entire workflow itself: Audited the environment (pip list, dependency check) Hit a ModuleNotFoundError, multiple Python installs were conflicting Ran where python to map every interpreter on the system Manually selected the correct Python 3.13 path and re ran the script Wrote a clean statevmachine backtester (strict no overlapping trades logic) Patched a yfinance MultiIndex quirk that would've crashed the script Built Plotly candlestick + RSI charts with buy/sell markers Calculated win rate, PnL, and summary stats Exported a polished single file HTML report. check the report at the end of the video or in the comments. Biggest takeaway: local LLMs aren't just "chat assistants" anymore. They debug their own environment, write production code, and ship a finished deliverable on consumer hardware, for $0 in API costs. If you're still calling local models "toys," you're already behind. This is just the beginning. Hermes agent just surpassed 1 trillion tokens in a single day on OpenRouter. Think about the scale of total token generation happening right now. Disclaimer: This is not financial advice. Consult a professional before making any trading decisions.show more

gemma-4-12B-agentic-fable5-composer2.5 V2 is out. the agentic upgrade to the... model trained on Fable 5's reasoning. Running it now with TurboQuant llama.cpp on a single RTX 4060( 8 GB VRAM) at 30 tokens/second with full 25000 context and reasoning: # The benchmarks v2 is built for coding + agentic work. writing code, running commands, using tools, debugging, multi step technical tasks. The clearest signal is tau2 bench telecom, an agentic tool use benchmark whose diagnose → fix → verify loop mirrors real terminal/debugging work: tau2 bench telecom numbers: base Gemma 4 12B: ~15% this finetune: ~55%. (Self reported) thats a huge jump # TheTom/llama-cpp-turboquant flags: llama-server.exe -m gemma4-v2-Q4_K_M.gguf -ngl 99 -c 25000 --cache-type-k q8_0 --cache-type-v turbo3 --port 8080 Flag breakdown: -ngl 99 → full GPU offload -c 25000 → 25K context --cache-type-k q8_0 --cache-type-v turbo3 → mixed-precision KV cache — K at 8-bit, V at ~3-bit via TurboQuant (Walsh Hadamard rotated polar quant, Google's own KV-compression research). Not even merged into mainline llama.cpp. running it off a fork. No API. No cloud. Just llama.cpp. well, a fork of it and any 6gb+ GPU. If you tried yuxinlu1/gemma-4-12B-coder-fable5-composer2.5-v1-GGUF, check this out and share your experience with the modelsshow more

This is the most hilarious thing I saw and... did today Ran gemma-4-12B-coder-fable5-composer2.5-v1-GGUF locally with 8 GB VRAM at 20+ tok/sec Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 launched June 9. By June 12 it was banned. I can't access it. You can't either. But here's the twist: I'm running a model trained on its chain of thought at 20 tok/s on my RTX 4060 8GB. Locally. Offline. No cloud. No export control. Enter: Gemma4-12B-Coder GGUF (Q4_K_M) Base: Google's gemma-4-12B-it Fine-tuned on verifiable Python CoT data: - Primary: Composer 2.5 real reasoning traces (only passing solutions kept) - Auxiliary: Fable 5 used to redo the hard cases Composer missed. Every training example's reasoning led to code that actually ran. No hallucinated logic. Llama.cpp flags: -m gemma4-coding-Q4_K_M.gguf -cnv -ngl 44 -c 64000 -v (huggingface model link in comments) Flag breakdown: -ngl 44 → offload 44 layers to GPU (tune this for your VRAM) -c 64000 → 64K context window -cnv → conversation/chat mode -v → verbose output The irony writes itself. Anthropic spent weeks telling the world Fable 5 (mythos) is too powerful to release. Then released it. Then got banned from serving it, including their own researchers. Meanwhile: a Gemma 4 12B fine tune, trained on Fable 5's reasoning, runs fully offline on my mid range consumer GPU No API. No cloud. Just me and llama.cpp. This is why local AI matters. Check out the model's link in the comments. How's your experience been with this model?show more

90% of "AI developers" just download pre packaged GGUF... files from Hugging Face, hit run, and call it a day. The top 10% know how to pull the raw safetensors, run the math, and quantize massive models into Q4_K_M themselves. If you think llama.cpp can only execute models, you’re missing the best part of the open source ecosystem. It’s a high performance optimization suite. Manually stripping 69% of the VRAM footprint off a brand new model architecture is where real infrastructure value is made. If you want to actually master local inference and deploy models like Google’s massive Gemma 4 12B it on consumer NVIDIA hardware using llama.cpp, you need to learn this pipeline. Let's build it. I just took the raw 22.7 GB Gemma 4 baseline and manually compressed it down to a 7.02 GB Q4_K_M GGUF artifact using llama.cpp. That is a 69% reduction in footprint. No quality loss. No VRAM bottlenecks. Just native, hardware accelerated C++ inference running a full 2,50,000 token context window on a dual NVIDIA Tesla T4 setup. Stop melting your VRAM on unoptimized weights and stop relying on other people's pipelines. Own your stack. I mapped this entire architecture from dynamic binary fetching to raw quantization and real time GPU streaming into a single, bulletproof notebook. Notebook link is in the comments below. Bookmark this blueprint for your next deployment and tell me which quantization works best for your workflow and model.show more

i just ran Google's brand new Unsloth Gemma4 12B... dense GGUF on my RTX 4060 using llama.cpp + CUDA 13.2 21 tokens per second. on a budget consumer GPU. locally. no API. no cloud. no subscription. and the benchmarks are absolutely cooked # first let's talk architecture because this is genuinely different every multimodal model you've used has a frozen vision encoder + frozen audio encoder + LLM backbone glued together Gemma 4 12B is different it's a single decoder only transformer. that's it. vision? raw 48×48 pixel patches → one matmul → projected directly into the LLM audio? raw 16kHz signal sliced into 40ms frames → linear projection → same LLM input space no encoder tax. no latency penalty. no fragmented memory to put the encoder savings in perspective: old Gemma 4 26B approach: - 550M param vision encoder (frozen) - 300M param audio encoder (frozen) - LLM backbone Gemma 4 12B: - 35M param vision embedder (a single matmul) - no audio encoder at all - LLM backbone handles EVERYTHING 550M → 35M for vision alone. that's a 15x reduction this is why the gemma-4-12b-it-Q4_K_M.gguf is just 6.6 GBs!!! and it has 256K native context context # Benchmarks: AIME 2026 (math olympiad): 77.5% GPQA Diamond (expert science): 78.8% LiveCodeBench v6 (real code): 72% Codeforces ELO: 1659 MMLU Pro: 77.2% MATH-Vision: 79.7% BigBench Extra Hard: 53% inference → llama.cpp, LM Studio, vLLM, SGLang llamacpp flags: -m "gemma-4-12b-it-Q4_K_M.gguf" -ngl 99 -c 8000 -v --port 8080 Available on huggingface now! Link belowshow more

Right now, you may not have access to models... like GPT‑5.6 Sol, GPT‑4.6 Terra, GPT‑5.6 Luna, Claude Mythos 5, or Claude Fable 5. But you can run something surprisingly powerful today, locally, and completely free. in the next 10 mins on your 8 GB VRAM gaming laptop. Gemma 4 26B A4B QAT (MoE) delivers strong performance on a standard 8 GB VRAM GPU using Ollama, with no API, no usage limits, and no external dependencies. Out of the box, it reaches around 20 tokens per second without any optimizations. Only one command in your terminal: Ollama run gemma4:26b This means: Full offline capability (privacy by default) Zero recurring cost Competitive performance for many real world tasks Fast enough for interactive use on cheap consumer hardware If you're waiting for cutting edge cloud models, you're missing what is already practical today: a capable, local LLM that runs entirely on your own machine.show more

Free NVIDIA GPU with 16 GB VRAM GPU for... Running Local LLMs! If you want to master local LLMs but you're waiting until you can afford a $1,500 GPU, you're honestly not going to make it. The open source AI ecosystem is moving way too fast for you to wait on your budget to catch up. Especially when you can build a bleeding edge inference engine from scratch right now, completely for free. You don't need a heavy local rig to start. Google is literally letting you use an enterprise grade NVIDIA Tesla T4 GPU for $0/hour. At standard cloud computing rates (~$0.20/hr), Google Colab’s 4 hour daily free tier hands you roughly $24 worth of data center tier GPU compute every single month. And most people just waste it. Let’s talk about the hardware you get access to for free. The NVIDIA Tesla T4 is an absolute workhorse: - Architecture: NVIDIA Turing (TU104) - VRAM: 16GB GDDR6 (320 GB/s bandwidth) - Compute: 320 Tensor Cores | 2560 CUDA Cores - Performance: 130 TOPS INT8 | 8.1 TFLOPS FP32 - Power: Sipping energy at a max 70W TDP This is the exact same hardware I used to run DeepMind's Gemma 4 26B A4B QAT MoE at a 250,000 context window without a single Out Of Memory (OOM) crash. If you have a web browser and 10 minutes, you have everything you need. I’ve put together a fully documented, cell by cell Google Colab notebook that teaches you exactly how to do this. Here is what the notebook actually teaches you: - How to provision an Ubuntu Linux environment with CUDA 13.0 and verify your driver stack. - How to pull the source code and compile the latest llama.cpp C++ binaries from scratch, specifically optimizing the build for your exact GPU using the -DCMAKE_CUDA_ARCHITECTURES=native flag. - How to directly download quantized local LLMs (GGUF format) straight from HuggingFace using the CLI. - How to manage 16GB VRAM limits, offload neural network layers to the GPU, and push massive context windows. Compile raw llama.cpp, ollama run a model, or spin up the LM Studio CLI. Pick whatever stack you are comfortable with. just start building. No hardware. No credit card. No excuses. Bookmark this post right now so you don't lose the tutorial. Even if you don't have time to run it today, you are going to want this workflow in your engineering toolkit. The link to the free Colab Notebook is in the comments below. Lemme know if you need more tutorials like this.show more

The "I don't have enough VRAM" excuse just died.... I’m running Meta’s new 30B Muse Glimmer Q6_K_XL with a massive 130k context window on just 26GB VRAM FREE compute on Kaggle. Kaggle provides you free 2x Nvidia T4 GPUs. 30 hours usage each week! Yesterday, I showed you the violent throughput of Muse Glimmer on a single RTX 4090. Today, we are securing a Dual NVIDIA T4 GPU cluster with 32GB of total VRAM for exactly $0 and dropping the massive 24.5GB Q6_K_XL GGUF onto it. Here is the exact Kaggle workflow and benchmarking breakdown: # 1. The Storage Bypass & Setup I built a clean cell by cell script in the file. We dynamically fetch the CUDA accelerated llama.cpp binaries and use wget to stream the model directly into Kaggle's /kaggle/tmp scratch storage, which cleanly bypasses their 19.5GB output directory limit. # 2. The Multi GPU Performance With the -ngl 99 flag offloading all model layers across both T4 GPUs (32GB VRAM combined), we pushed a massive 131,072 token context window (-c 131072). The benchmark numbers: Prefill: 265.9 t/s Decode: 9.0 t/s VRAM Total: 26.5 GB # 3. The Architecture Insight The Q6_K_XL model itself is 24.5 GB. Because of Muse Glimmer's aggressive 16:1 GQA, the unquantized KV cache for a massive 130k context window only takes up 2 GB of memory. No heavily degraded Q4 KV quantization required. It just works. No compiling from source. No credit card. No OOM crashes. Zero excuses. If you’re running a single RTX 3090, 4090, or 5090, you need to experience this hyper efficient KV cache right now before the upcoming Qwen 3.8 27B drop completely steals your VRAM tomorrow. pick the Q4 or Q5 quants for 24 GB VRAM rigs. I'm dropping the Unsloth huggingface GGUF links and the free Kaggle notebook link in the replies. spin up your own instance, and show me your multi GPU benchmarks.show more