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Freedom251 › Blog › CUDA Graphs

How GLiClass FP8 Went from 59 ms to 16 ms on an RTX 4050 Laptop GPU

By Freedom251 Team · · 4 min read

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GLiClass’s first native FP8 adapter was slower than BF16: Yuri Pocepaev measured a 59.23 ms median for FP8 versus 24.18 ms for eager BF16 on an RTX 4050 Laptop GPU. After fusing auxiliary work with Triton and capturing encoder execution in CUDA Graphs, his FP8 median fell to 16.10 ms. That is a 3.68× improvement over his initial FP8 implementation—not a general claim that FP8 is always faster.

What the latency numbers compare

Pocepaev’s 2026 report measures one batch-1 request: a fixed AG News example classified against four candidate labels. Each timed request included tokenization and postprocessing. The author warmed up the model, evaluated quality, then timed 50 additional requests, synchronizing CUDA before and after each timing. Model loading, Triton compilation, and CUDA Graph preparation were excluded; laptop clocks and thermals were not locked.

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Runtime Median latency p95 latency Peak allocated tensor memory
BF16, eager 24.18 ms 29.67 ms 3.219 GiB
BF16 + CUDA Graphs 23.79 ms 24.45 ms 3.238 GiB
Initial native FP8 adapter 59.23 ms 66.36 ms 2.145 GiB
FP8 + Triton 37.97 ms 46.62 ms 2.144 GiB
FP8 + Triton + CUDA Graphs 16.10 ms 16.44 ms 2.166 GiB

These are the author’s measurements from one setup, not an independently reproduced benchmark or a multi-system test. Against the same-graph BF16 control, optimized FP8 was 1.48× faster on this request. The 3.68× figure instead compares two FP8 adapter versions. The table’s memory column is allocated tensor memory during the measured run, not total GPU memory use.

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Why the first FP8 version was slower

FP8 covered selected projections, not every tensor

The derivative checkpoint quantizes 168 matrices across 24 mT5 encoder blocks. It stores weights in FP8 E4M3 with per-output-channel scales and dynamically quantizes activations. Embeddings, normalization layers, and classification components remain BF16, so W8A8 describes selected projection operations rather than the whole model.

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Pocepaev reports weight-file sizes of 2,259,902,516 bytes for the derivative checkpoint and 3,416,522,340 bytes for BF16, a 33.85% reduction. Smaller weights saved storage, but did not by themselves make inference quicker.

Quantization and dispatch overhead erased the expected gain

The initial adapter used torch._scaled_mm with cuBLAS for the FP8 matrix multiplications. Profiling still counted 3,269 GPU kernel executions for the request, including separate work to find activation maxima, calculate scales, convert types, pad rows, and process outputs. Those auxiliary operations and launches outweighed the benefit of using smaller-precision matrix multiplications in this implementation.

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What changed to reach 16.10 ms

Triton fused work around the matrix multiplications

The first optimization moved activation quantization into a Triton kernel and fused output scaling into a second Triton kernel. Median latency dropped from 59.23 ms to 37.97 ms. This step reduced auxiliary overhead while retaining native FP8 GEMMs.

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CUDA Graphs reduced encoder dispatch overhead

The next step captured encoder work in CUDA Graphs. The adapter uses sequence-length buckets of 64, 128, 192, and 256 tokens, padding an input to its bucket and masking extra positions. One graph-capture compatibility issue was handled by constructing the attention mask outside the captured region.

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With Triton fusion and graphs together, the profiled request used 1,425 GPU kernel executions rather than 3,269 for the initial adapter; all 168 native FP8 GEMMs remained. The resulting 16.10 ms median is specific to this implementation and measured request shape.

What the quality check does—and does not—show

The report compares BF16 and optimized FP8 on 664 examples: a seeded subset of 256 AG News test examples, plus the full English and Russian SIB-200 test splits of 204 examples each. SIB-200 candidate labels were in English for both language splits.

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Evaluation set and measure BF16 Optimized FP8 Difference
AG News macro-F1 79.08% 79.49% +0.41 percentage points
SIB-200 English macro-F1 84.57% 84.04% −0.53 percentage points
SIB-200 Russian macro-F1 84.09% 83.42% −0.67 percentage points
Top-1 prediction agreement across all 664 examples BF16 and optimized FP8 agreed on 99.25% Agreement is not accuracy

The small AG News increase is not evidence that quantization improved the model, and the SIB-200 scores show small declines. This evaluation does not establish quality retention across other languages or production tasks. The report also does not preserve full score distributions, so it makes no claim about all-logit changes or calibration.

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How to interpret or reproduce the result

The result is a workload-specific inference engineering report, not a general GPU benchmark. A meaningful comparison with another implementation should align the details that affect latency and quality:

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  • GPU model and laptop power or thermal conditions; the reported clocks and thermals were not locked.
  • Model and checkpoint revision, software stack, batch size, sequence length, and number of candidate labels.
  • Warmup and synchronization method, and whether tokenization and postprocessing are part of the timed request.
  • Whether loading, compilation, and graph preparation are included, and whether quality is evaluated on the same examples.

The report does not measure larger-batch sustained throughput, other GPUs, other operating systems, or production workloads. Its roughly 2.17 GiB optimized-run allocation is not a full loading-memory requirement: the author says the loader temporarily reconstructs weights in BF16 before replacing projections. Nor is allocated tensor memory equivalent to total VRAM use reported by nvidia-smi.

Pocepaev describes a Hugging Face repository with the weights, tokenizer, dependencies, adapter, and an inference.py entry point, and says the model, code, and report are available under Apache-2.0. The current repository URL and artifact revision are not established here, so verify the repository and revision before relying on those availability or licensing details.

The engineering lesson

As Pocepaev puts it, “The main takeaway is simple: quantization gives you a smaller representation; making it faster is a separate engineering problem.” In this case, FP8 reduced weight-file size, while Triton fusion and CUDA Graphs addressed the extra work and dispatch overhead that had made the first FP8 path slow.

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CUDA GraphsFP8GLiClassinference optimizationRTX 4050Triton

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