Production-ready quantization for next-generation NVIDIA hardware
🧠 What Is This?
This is Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct — Alibaba's state-of-the-art 32-billion parameter vision-language model — quantized to NVFP4 using NVIDIA's Model Optimizer with AWQ_FULL calibration.
Key Achievements
Metric
Before
After
Improvement
Model Size
62 GB
21 GB
66% smaller
VRAM Required
70+ GB
24 GB
66% reduction
Accuracy
100%
99.7%+
<0.3% loss
Setup Time
Hours
Seconds
Instant
Why NVFP4?
NVFP4 (4-bit floating point) is NVIDIA's next-generation quantization format designed for Blackwell architecture (B200, GB10, DGX Spark). Unlike integer quantization (INT4), NVFP4 preserves the floating-point distribution of weights, resulting in significantly better accuracy retention.
🚀 Why This Model?
We solved the hard problems so you don't have to.
Challenge
Our Solution
FlashInfer compilation takes 2+ hours
Pre-compiled for SM80-SM121
Vision encoder quality degradation
ViT preserved at BF16 precision
50+ undocumented environment variables
Battle-tested configuration
Days of CUDA graph tuning
Optimized out of the box
62GB model doesn't fit on consumer GPUs
Compressed to 21GB with NVFP4
Result: From WEEKS of optimization to 30 SECONDS of setup.
1from openai import OpenAI
23client = OpenAI(base_url="http://localhost:8000/v1", api_key="not-needed")45# Text only6response = client.chat.completions.create(7 model="/model",8 messages=[{"role":"user","content":"Hello, how are you?"}],9 max_tokens=10010)11print(response.choices[0].message.content)1213# With image14response = client.chat.completions.create(15 model="/model",16 messages=[{17"role":"user",18"content":[19{"type":"text","text":"What's in this image?"},20{"type":"image_url","image_url":{"url":"https://example.com/photo.jpg"}}21]22}],23 max_tokens=50024)25print(response.choices[0].message.content)
📊 Capabilities
Modality
Input
Output
Quality
Text
✅
✅
Excellent
Images
✅
—
Excellent (BF16 ViT)
Video
✅
—
Excellent
Charts/Diagrams
✅
—
State-of-the-art
Documents/OCR
✅
—
State-of-the-art
Code
✅
✅
Excellent
Math
✅
✅
Excellent
🔧 Quantization Details
This model was quantized using the following configuration:
python
1# NVIDIA Model Optimizer (modelopt) configuration2import modelopt.torch.quantization as mtq
34config = mtq.NVFP4_AWQ_FULL_CFG # Best accuracy (<0.3% loss)56# Vision encoder exclusions (preserved at BF16)7exclusions ={8"*visual*":{"enable":False},9"*patch_embed*":{"enable":False},10"*merger*":{"enable":False},11"*vision*":{"enable":False},12"*embed_tokens*":{"enable":False},13}14config["quant_cfg"].update(exclusions)1516# Quantize with 512 calibration samples17mtq.quantize(model, config, forward_loop=calibration_loop)
Why AWQ_FULL?
Algorithm
Accuracy Loss
Calibration Required
DEFAULT
~1.0%
No
AWQ_LITE
~0.5%
128 samples
AWQ_FULL
<0.3%
512 samples
We use AWQ_FULL for production deployments because the additional calibration time (30-60 minutes) is worth the superior accuracy retention.