An RTF above 1 for just 0.6B parameters suggests the bottleneck isn't the GPU, even on a 1080. The raw compute should be much faster. I'd bet it's mostly CPU overhead or an issue with the serving implementation.

you can install flash attention, et al, but if you're on windows, afaik, you can't use/run/install "triton kernels", which apparently make audio models scream. Whisper complains every time i start it, and it is pretty slow; so i just batch hundreds of audio files on a machine in the corner with a 3060 instead. technically i could batch them on a CPU, too, since i don't particularly care when they finish.