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[Feature Request] Support for Q4 / Q5 / Q6 quantizations (e.g. Unsloth's UD-Q4_K_XL to UD-Q6_K_XL) #222

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Description

@dainamiter

Feature Description

Currently, Strata primarily supports Q2_0, IQ2_XS, IQ3_XXS, and IQ3_S quantizations to fit within standard consumer setups (~64GB RAM + 12-24GB VRAM).

Would it be possible to add support for higher-precision quantizations, such as Q4 through Q6 models (e.g., Unsloth's UD-Q4_K_XL to UD-Q6_K_XL for Qwen3.8-Flash-Next: https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-GGUF)?

Motivation & Context

For users who have workstations or PCs with larger RAM pools (e.g., 96GB–128GB+ RAM) or multi-GPU setups (e.g., dual 3090/4090), running Q4/Q5/Q6 would provide noticeably higher reasoning quality and lower perplexity compared to IQ3/Q2.

Questions:

  1. Is supporting Q4+ (or unsloth dynamic/custom quants like UD-Q4_K_XL) on the roadmap?
  2. What are the main blockers for higher-bit quant support? (e.g., shard packing format/conversions in ref/tools, ggml tensor type implementations, or CPU-RAM offloading throughput bottlenecks?)
  3. Is there a guide or manual conversion workflow to pack and test custom GGUF quants directly with Strata?

Thank you for this incredible project!

Activity

  1. Niko1221 commented on Sep 30, 2026

    @Niko1221
    Owner

    Thanks. It's not on the roadmap: Strata targets 64 GB PCs, and the GSQ-RCO IQ3_S already matches the full BF16 model on the published benchmarks, so a Q4-Q6 file (well over 100 GB) would cost a lot of RAM for little gain. The engine does have kernels for Q4_K/Q5_K/Q6_K, so a GGUF of this architecture may load with --gguf-dir if each layer's gate/up/down tensors sit in one shard (see #171) and the PLE shard and tensor names match, but that is untested and unsupported. Closing as not planned.

  2. added a commit that references this issue on Oct 3, 2026
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