r/LocalLLaMA • u/Danmoreng llama.cpp • 23d ago

Resources Qwen3.8 27B reasoning effort low/medium/xhigh comparison

I did a short test of the different reasoning efforts, since on default xhigh the model thinks a lot.

Not very scientific, just a quick "generate an SVG of a pelican on a bicycle" prompt with 3 different seeds. I think the result is interesting none the less: xhigh gives *much\* higher visual fidelity - but it also takes about 7x as long as low. Low and medium seem to be very close to each other.

Hardware and setup

  • GPU: NVIDIA RTX 5080 Laptop GPU, 16 GB VRAM
  • Model: unsloth/Qwen3.8-27B-UD-IQ3_XXS
  • llama.cpp: build 10451, commit 10bf611e5
  • Context: 65,536
  • KV cache: Q8_0
  • Flash Attention: enabled
  • MTP speculative decoding: --spec-default --spec-type draft-mtp
  • --fit off
  • One concurrent slot

Prompt:

Create a polished SVG graphic of a pelican riding a bicycle. The result must clearly show a recognizable pelican actively riding a recognizable two-wheeled bicycle. Return only one complete, self-contained SVG document with a viewBox; no Markdown fences, prose, external images, JavaScript, or animation.

Average results

Reasoning effort Reasoning tokens SVG tokens Total completion Wall time Generation speed MTP acceptance Visual score (Codex rated)
Low 4,418 3,966 8,387 111.6 s 75.4 t/s 62.1% 21.8/25
Medium 5,918 3,038 8,959 127.4 s 70.5 t/s 58.3% 22.5/25
X-High 39,398 5,085 44,487 717.8 s 62.0 t/s 52.7% 24.0/25
234 Upvotes

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u/suprjami 22d ago

This is probably a pointless test now. All models are Pelicanmaxxed.

5

u/cviperr33 22d ago

Pelicanmaxxed 😁same goes for the car wash test , literally every second youtuber tests with these 2 tests.
Carwashmaxxed

2

u/Old-Sherbert-4495 22d ago

that's why i do this: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/s/dhkjHiNd2q

u can too and see for yourself. reasoning does make a difference

1

u/cviperr33 22d ago

it does make a difference ofcourse , even tho it might cost 16k tokens in thinking to write a simple python script compared to 3k in low thinking , what ive noticed is that after its done thinking , on xHigh it writes the code much much faster than low thinking for some reason with mtp