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RTX 4090 D Tensor Unlock: What Can Quantized MoE Inference Gain?

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I am not a native English speaker; this article was translated by AI.

In the previous post, I unlocked the RTX 4090 D and measured nearly doubled throughput on certain Tensor GEMM workloads. After sharing the results on X, a friend noted: “This probably does little to nothing for quantized MoE inference.”

This card mainly runs Strata with an IQ3_S-quantized Qwen3.8-Flash-Next model. Checking the source and logs against actual compute paths confirms that assessment.

TL;DR: Virtually zero gain (fluctuations stay within measurement noise). The 4090 D unlock only restores floating-point Tensor rates (FP16/BF16/TF32). Low-bit quantized MoE inference runs predominantly on INT8/INT32 integer instructions, where real-world bottlenecks lie in memory bandwidth, PCIe transfers, and CPU offloading, rather than floating-point compute.

Why Doubled FP Throughput Does Nothing for Quantized MoE
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Floating-Point Rates Grew, but Integer Stayed Flat
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First, the controlled benchmark (multiplying square matrices of side 8192 under the same 425 W power limit):

GEMM Mode Stock TFLOPS Unlocked TFLOPS Throughput Gain
FP16 → FP32 152.83 195.96 +28.22%
BF16 → FP32 153.81 250.97 +63.16%
TF32 76.49 145.55 +90.28%
Regular FP32 Control 54.27 54.71 +0.80%

Compute paths taking FP16/BF16 inputs with FP32 accumulation improved significantly. However: INT8, INT4, and dp4a instruction throughput remained completely identical.

Strata Expert Kernels Run Pure Integer Instructions
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Despite the large parameter count of MoE models, what instructions actually run when serving an IQ3_S-quantized model?

Examining Strata 0.1.48’s quantized-expert prefill kernel source code reveals the direct PTX instruction:

mma.sync.aligned.m16n8k32.row.col.s32.s8.s8.s32

Here, s8 represents signed INT8 inputs, and s32 represents INT32 accumulation. This instruction belongs entirely to the integer execution path that received zero speedup. While secondary routines (e.g. attention and minor cuBLAS calls) use some BF16 operations, the critical path is dominated by integer arithmetic and dequantization/data unpacking.

The Bottleneck is Memory Bandwidth and Offloading, Not Compute
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The unlock does not grant the 4090 D a single additional byte of memory bandwidth or PCIe bandwidth. Strata keeps a subset of experts in VRAM while offloading the rest to host RAM via CPU computation in an overlapping pipeline. The system is fundamentally bounded by memory bandwidth and data transfers. By Amdahl’s Law, speeding up an operation that occupies a negligible portion of the runtime yields no noticeable overall improvement.

Benchmark Verification: Does Unlocking Make It Faster?
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Community Results: Controlled 48GB 4090 Benchmark (0.98x - 0.99x)
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A researcher evaluated this scenario on a hardware-modded 48 GB RTX 4090 running Strata 0.1.47 with IQ3_S under a controlled test:

Prefill Scenario Stock tokens/s Unlocked tokens/s Unlocked / Stock Ratio
8K Input 3518.8 3457.8 0.983×
32K Input 3916.6 3890.3 0.993×

The data is unmistakable: under long-input prefill, performance showed no gain and even fell slightly within noise margins. Generation (decode) throughput similarly fluctuated without measurable advantage.

Local Serving Window Observation
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In my local Strata 0.1.48 deployment, monitor snapshots across long operating windows showed comparable patterns:

Metric Unlocked Window (82 reqs) Stock Window (39 reqs)
Generated Tokens 60,707 25,163
Weighted Generation Rate (tokens/s) 126.34 141.14
Median Generation Rate (tokens/s) 130.6 142.2
Weighted Prefill Rate (tokens/s) 1775.79 2170.54
Prefix Reuse Ratio 94.02% 82.87%
MTP Draft Acceptance Ratio 68.05% 72.58%
Request lengths and cache hit rates vary in natural workloads, so this is not a strictly controlled A/B test. However, it confirms that the stock-rate setup fully matches or exceeds the unlocked performance level in practice; unlocking delivers no palpable difference.

Which Workloads Actually Benefit from Unlocking?
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If quantized MoE inference gains almost nothing, where does the unlocked Tensor power actually pay off?

  1. Full / Half-Precision Fine-Tuning and Training (LoRA / SFT): Heavy matrix multiplication paths utilizing FP16/BF16 inputs with FP32 accumulation see immediate, significant acceleration.
  2. Diffusion Models for Image/Video Generation (Stable Diffusion / Flux / CogVideoX): Denoising backbones rely heavily on dense floating-point GEMM residing entirely within VRAM.
  3. Dense LLM Inference with Native Precision (e.g., BF16) and Large Batches: Compute-bound rather than memory-bandwidth-bound regimes reap clear rewards.

Stability and Data Archiving
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During prolonged operation, the card encountered an Xid 79: GPU has fallen off the bus event. It also recurred once after reverting to stock rates, indicating the incident was not strictly tied to the unlock state itself, but rather related to power transients, drivers, or custom kernel settings (7.3.0-ros2go-btf). The card is currently running in stable daily service at stock rates.

A dedicated replay script with fixed prompts and aligned cache states has been prepared for future controlled tests. Sanitized raw CSVs and verification scripts are available:

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