Q3_K_XL vs Q8_K_XL accuracy testing done anywhere?

#41
by jdchmiel - opened

Other than the KLD vs filesize chart at unsloth, does anyone know of an accuracy test done at different quantizations? I cannot quite run dspark with the lossless q8 and am curious how much 'worse' a 128gb sized version would be. For example https://pi-local-coding-bench.dev/ shows an IQ2 and an antirez full variant scoring 70 and 90 in the SWE bench subset. a 20 pt drop takes it down into qwen3.6 27b territory. I wonder if anyone has any numbers to share anywhere for the quants file sizes in the middle?

I can only speculate that a measured drop would be quite noticeable even for Q3_K_XL, since DS Flash is already at 4-bit natively and any further quantization eats into it aggressively. Judging from KLD, even UD-Q4_K_XL could show some measurable degradations. UD-IQ4_XS probably is the smallest quant I would consider for practical use (task-aware) as a bare minimum and as a compromise. If you have to be sure that you get most out of it, stick to UD-Q4_K_XL or Q8_K_XL.

thats the exact KLD chart i specifically said "other than" as actual performance does not always directly correspond

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