QAT variant of Gemma4 26B A4B is not working well for me

Reddit r/LocalLLaMA Models

Summary

A user reports that the QAT quantized variant of Gemma4 26B A4B performs worse on a chessboard SVG test compared to the non-QAT version, with unstable piece drawing despite using suggested settings.

I am using llama.cpp version b9549 with this arguments as recommended: llama-server --temp 1.0 --top-p 0.95 --top-k 64 -hf ... Here is what I got on chessboard svg test [https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1t53dhp/quality\_comparison\_between\_qwen\_36\_27b/](https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1t53dhp/quality_comparison_between_qwen_36_27b/) google/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-q4\_0-gguf:IT [google\/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-q4\_0-gguf:IT](https://preview.redd.it/albcm4kp0w5h1.png?width=812&format=png&auto=webp&s=185cc22603a164ffe1f6c8aebdd99918c3fd874f) unsloth/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-GGUF:Q4\_K\_XL [unsloth\/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-GGUF:Q4\_K\_XL](https://preview.redd.it/cqy8lvdt0w5h1.png?width=814&format=png&auto=webp&s=cef38c320510285b52d8f593175940523153e87b) For comparison here is the old gemma4 with the same arguments unsloth/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-GGUF:Q4\_K\_XL [unsloth\/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-GGUF:Q4\_K\_XL](https://preview.redd.it/vrlerwdg2w5h1.png?width=948&format=png&auto=webp&s=3e2a5ea0c31af6a5a7ca67105634620f406f9726) As you can see old A4B got everything right. I ran it multiple times, it's not perfect, sometimes it swaps color pattern, but at least pieces are rock solid compared to QAT version. Did anyone try it, do you see the same results?
Original Article

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