A Reddit user with an RTX 3060 12GB and 32GB DDR3 RAM is evaluating new QAT-based Gemma 31B GGUF quantizations. They currently run an older Unsloth Gemma 31B IQ3_XXS build at long context, with some tensor and mmproj offloading to CPU. The post asks which Q2-Q3 quant to choose, whether QAT changes quality expectations, and whether MTP would help or hurt under tight VRAM limits.
A r/LocalLLaMA post notes that Unsloth’s Gemma 4 QAT MTP assistant models are now available in GGUF format. The root directories include q8_0 files named mtp-gemma-4-*.gguf, while MTP folders contain q8_0 and larger quantized variants. The listed releases cover 12B, 26B-A4B, 31B, E2B, E2B mobile, E4B, and E4B mobile it-qat-GGUF repositories.
A r/LocalLLaMA user is looking for benchmarks comparing Gemma 4 4-bit QAT models, via Unsloth, against standard 8-bit non-QAT quantized models. They understand QAT is expected to preserve much of the BF16 baseline accuracy, but want hard numbers against traditional 8-bit PTQ. The post highlights scattered feedback but no clear head-to-head evaluation yet.
The post argues that recent Google QAT quantization has several implementation problems, including token embeddings being quantized to q6k instead of using a pure mode. It also claims llama-quantize has a hardcoded parameter that mismatches some optimized groups, and that 32-block groups are misaligned. The author recommends Unsloth UD Q4_K_XL as a temporary option and says they are working on a patch.
A r/LocalLLaMA user shared quick throughput numbers for Gemma4 QAT with MTP speculative decoding on an RTX 3090 24GB setup. They report roughly 1.2-1.8x TPS improvement, with Gemma 4 31B moving from about 40 tok/s to 70-80 tok/s. The author frames this as a rough benchmark, using 11 task categories and noting stochastic variation from temp 1.0.
An analysis of Gemma 4 QAT GGUF files reveals that Google's official 'Q4_0' releases actually employ a mixed-precision strategy. For smaller models like E2B and E4B, Google keeps critical token embeddings in Q6_K and certain projection weights in F16. This makes Google's Q4_0 files larger and more precise than Unsloth's 'Q4_K_XL' versions, which default to standard Q4_0 for almost all tensors.
A Reddit user shared their experience with the Gemma 4 31B QAT (Quantization-Aware Training) model. Compared to traditional GGUF quants like Q6_K_L, the QAT version delivers noticeable quality improvements in roleplay and long-context tasks. Additionally, combining the QAT model with Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) yielded massive speedups, boosting generation speeds from ~20 t/s to up to 50 t/s.
A popular Reddit thread on r/LocalLLaMA discusses the potential of 2-bit Quantization Aware Training (QAT) for large MoE models (120B to 400B). While current QAT efforts focus on 4-bit, users speculate whether a 2-bit QAT model could fit into consumer hardware (64GB/128GB RAM) and outperform a 4-bit model of half its size. This approach is proposed as a practical alternative to training ternary (1.58-bit) LLMs from scratch.
A popular Reddit thread addresses user confusion over running Gemma 4 31B locally. It distinguishes between MTP (Multi-Token Prediction for inference speedup) and QAT (Quantization-Aware Training for preserving 4-bit quality). It also confirms that llama.cpp's new MTP support requires updated GGUF files and a secondary draft model file for acceleration.
A LocalLLaMA user highlighted that the newly released QAT (Quantization-Aware Training) variant of Google's Gemma-4-26B-A4B model underperforms compared to its non-QAT predecessor. Testing via llama.cpp on a chessboard SVG generation task showed significant rendering errors in the QAT version. The non-QAT GGUF version, however, produced highly accurate results under identical settings.