My experience also aligns with this. I'm running gemma4 31B on a 4090 through llm.cpp with unsloth models.
I also run Qwen 3.6. Qwen is good for thinking and planning as it is faster, but Gemma4's generated code is much higher quality in the first try (Rust, C++ and C#). so it needs less revisions to be at a level I'm comfortable for merging.
Nice. I flip flop between Qwen 3.5 9B Q6_M and Gemma4 12B Q4_K_M on a 4080 Super. They run at about the same speed and I can have them review each other's plan or diffs. For smaller projects I find them very capable, and I can step up to a better quant for slightly more challenging work.
Where does “big model highly quantized” start getting worse than “smaller model less quantized”? Is there a general formula or is it just trial and error?
I can't Gemma4 to actually finish a turn properly, it's always ending abruptly or making malformed tool calls. It's probably something I've misconfigured in oMLX or Opencode.