NInfer

Selected checkpoints. Maximum single-GPU inference performance.

NInfer is a from-scratch C++/CUDA inference engine for explicitly registered Qwen checkpoints on a single NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090. It runs text, image, and video prompts through a local CLI or OpenAI-/Anthropic-compatible HTTP APIs.

NInfer deliberately supports a closed set of model artifacts instead of acting as a general model runtime:

Model	Weights	NInfer artifact	Size	SHA-256
Qwen3.6-27B	groupwise-int	qwen3_6_27b.ninfer	17,495,365,888 bytes (16.29 GiB)	7b51600ffd10632b9660f56085efdd9b751d79733ad32036a652234b64bebe7b
Qwen3.6-27B NVFP4	nvfp4	qwen3_6_27b_nvfp4.ninfer	18,324,064,000 bytes (17.07 GiB)	bce5f00d066c0f20f1317bf1fdcb458264cf95837c3b1f3fbec163694627893a
Qwen3.8-27B	groupwise-int	qwen3_8_27b.ninfer	18,210,531,328 bytes (16.96 GiB)	eec39564993d6e9c7d5e383382a760f093465c9d163ec9a1bd6b80199514bf3e
Qwen3.8-27B NVFP4	nvfp4	qwen3_8_27b_nvfp4.ninfer	21,492,695,040 bytes (20.02 GiB)	bb3360522a06e136e0367f5703414d26272b7285c8a6ab6194135c17dbd81b32
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B	groupwise-int	qwen3_6_35b_a3b.ninfer	22,783,246,080 bytes (21.22 GiB)	1fb9ea0b5b8561e49d9604115ec89e5d9f2b6f6434e32c37c57fffd480a325d2

Qwen3.6-27B and Qwen3.8-27B each expose two registered weight profiles. The version-2 artifact identity selects the profile without a separate runtime flag; Qwen3.8 uses target key qwen3_8_27b while sharing the 27B execution package. The Qwen3.6 nvfp4 profile uses W4A4 Tensor Core MMA for prefill and A16 NVFP4 kernels for decode. The Qwen3.8 nvfp4 profile preserves its source's mixed allocation: NVFP4 MLP weights in Text layers 0–55 and row-scaled FP8 for the token embedding, attention input/output projections, GDN Q/K/V/Z and output projections, output head, and remaining MLP weights. All four 27B artifacts retain the same Text, Vision, MTP, prefix-reuse, CLI, and serving routes.

Performance

The published measurements cover the three Qwen3.6 artifact profiles and the Qwen3.8-27B NVFP4 profile. The Qwen3.8-27B groupwise-int profile is supported by current NInfer builds but is not yet included in a published benchmark campaign.

Concurrent MTP3 decode

Saturated decode was measured on an RTX 5090 with INT8 group-64 KV cache, CUDA Graphs, MTP3, and one 8,192-token generation per active request. The values below are aggregate committed decode throughput from complete one-second intervals in which the actual decode batch remained equal to the configured concurrency. MTP acceptance is aggregated over the complete request wave. Each concurrency cell reports decode tok/s / MTP acceptance; profiles should be read independently.

Model profile	C=1 tok/s / accept	C=2 tok/s / accept	C=4 tok/s / accept	C=8 tok/s / accept	C8 / C1
Qwen3.6-27B groupwise-int	185.8 / 68.2%	247.0 / 69.0%	309.5 / 68.4%	535.0 / 68.3%	2.88×
Qwen3.6-27B nvfp4	202.4 / 69.3%	399.7 / 71.4%	699.7 / 69.3%	1,146.9 / 68.6%	5.67×
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B groupwise-int	593.0 / 67.2%	877.7 / 68.2%	1,166.0 / 69.8%	1,313.8 / 67.3%	2.22×
Qwen3.8-27B nvfp4	143.8 / 48.9%	267.6 / 48.1%	461.1 / 45.8%	766.6 / 46.0%	5.33×

At C=8, Qwen3.6-35B-A3B reaches 1,313.8 aggregate decode tok/s. Qwen3.6-27B NVFP4 reaches 1,146.9 tok/s and 5.67× its C=1 throughput. Qwen3.8-27B NVFP4 has 45.8–48.9% MTP acceptance, versus 67.2–71.4% across the other measured profiles, so aggregate committed throughput reflects both execution performance and speculative acceptance.

Single-request serving

The single-request corpus was measured on the same GPU with INT8 group-64 KV cache, CUDA Graphs, and a 1,024-token prefill chunk. Each reported fixture uses five fixed seeds after server warm-up. Targets and weight profiles are reported independently rather than as cross-target comparisons. Requests were submitted serially to a persistent server. The Qwen3.8-27B NVFP4 MTP0 results use the same dedicated serial corpus runner as the Qwen3.6 profiles; its MTP3 results come from the C=1 point of the fixed concurrent-corpus campaign documented in Performance.

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B

• MTP0 at a 7,680-token prompt: 15,544.3 prefill tok/s and 271.1 decode tok/s.
• MTP0 at a 260,096-token prompt: 5,157.1 prefill tok/s and 188.2 decode tok/s.
• MTP3 long reasoning: 620.3–726.2 decode tok/s with 72.7–82.8% acceptance.
• MTP3 structured output: 770.9 decode tok/s, 89.1% acceptance, and 3.67 tokens/round.

Qwen3.6-27B (groupwise-int)

• MTP0 at a 7,680-token prompt: 3,218.1 prefill tok/s and 77.6 decode tok/s.
• MTP0 at a 260,096-token prompt: 1,614.8 prefill tok/s and 54.8 decode tok/s.
• MTP3 long reasoning: 161.9–175.4 decode tok/s with 73.4–78.8% acceptance.
• MTP3 structured output: 193.0 decode tok/s, 88.7% acceptance, and 3.66 tokens/round.

Qwen3.6-27B (nvfp4)

• MTP0 at a 7,680-token prompt: 11,191.5 prefill tok/s and 86.4 decode tok/s.
• MTP0 at a 260,096-token prompt: 2,510.6 prefill tok/s and 59.9 decode tok/s.
• MTP3 long reasoning: 213.1–231.0 decode tok/s with 76.3–81.1% acceptance.
• MTP3 structured output: 252.2 decode tok/s, 89.8% acceptance, and 3.69 tokens/round.
• Against groupwise-int on the same corpus and runtime options: 3.48× the 7,680-token prefill throughput, 1.55× the 260,096-token prefill throughput, and 30–32% higher MTP3 decode throughput.

Qwen3.8-27B (nvfp4)

• MTP0 at a 7,680-token prompt: 8,340.4 prefill tok/s and 71.2 decode tok/s.
• MTP0 at a 260,096-token prompt: 2,203.1 prefill tok/s and 52.9 decode tok/s.
• MTP3 long reasoning: 151.4–195.2 decode tok/s with 56.2–76.0% acceptance.
• MTP3 structured output: 219.8 decode tok/s, 90.8% acceptance, and 3.72 tokens/round.

See Performance for the full methodology, variability, reproduction command, and per-fixture results.

Evaluation

Capability scores were measured through NInfer's OpenAI-compatible serving route with thinking enabled, MTP=3, and EvalScope 1.9.0 (0-shot, rule scoring, one sample per problem):

Model profile	AIME 2025	AIME 2026	GPQA-Diamond	ERQA	RealWorldQA
Qwen3.6-27B groupwise-int	86.67%	93.33%	86.87%	—	—
Qwen3.6-27B NVFP4	93.33%	93.33%	84.34%	—	—
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B groupwise-int	90.00%	90.00%	85.35%	—	—
Qwen3.8-27B groupwise-int	96.67%	96.67%	87.37%	66.25%	82.22%
Qwen3.8-27B NVFP4	96.67%	96.67%	90.40%	66.25%	83.53%

The Qwen3.6 rows used temperature 0.6 and presence penalty 1.0; the Qwen3.8-27B rows used temperature 1.0 and presence penalty 0.0. The multimodal columns (ERQA and RealWorldQA) ran with --vision at a 81,920-token context limit; the text columns used a 262,144-token limit except Qwen3.8-27B NVFP4, which needs 252,928 to fit the RTX 5090 after weights.

These are single-sample results under that NInfer evaluation profile, not pass@k. See the model cards and full performance document for correct/total counts and evaluation notes.

Requirements

NInfer currently requires:

• 64-bit Linux;
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 (sm_120a);
• NVIDIA driver support for CUDA 13.1 and the CUDA Toolkit 13.1 or newer;
• CMake 3.28 or newer and a C++20-capable host compiler;
• pkg-config;
• FFmpeg development libraries: libavformat >= 60, libavcodec >= 60, libavutil >= 58, and libswscale >= 7;
• libcurl >= 7.85;
• Ninja, when using the commands below.

The build rejects CUDA architectures other than 120a. There is no install target or packaged binary distribution; NInfer is run from its source build tree.

Build

git clone https://github.com/Neroued/ninfer.git
cd ninfer

cmake -S . -B build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build --parallel

The default configuration builds:

build/apps/ninfer
build/apps/ninfer-serve

Tests, benchmarks, and maintainer tools are excluded from the default build.

Docker

Build the runtime image on a 64-bit Linux host with an RTX 5090, a CUDA 13.1-compatible NVIDIA driver, Docker, and the NVIDIA Container Toolkit.

docker build --tag ninfer:local .

Download a model into models/ as described below, then run the HTTP server:

docker run --rm \
  --gpus '"device=0"' \
  --publish 8080:8080 \
  --volume "$PWD/models:/models:ro" \
  ninfer:local \
  ninfer-serve /models/qwen3_6_27b.ninfer \
  --host 0.0.0.0

Run the CLI from the same image:

docker run --rm \
  --gpus '"device=0"' \
  --volume "$PWD/models:/models:ro" \
  ninfer:local \
  ninfer /models/qwen3_6_27b.ninfer \
  --prompt "Explain prefill and decode in three sentences." \
  --max-new 256

Download a model

Use the Hugging Face CLI to download one of the registered artifacts:

hf download neroued/Qwen3.6-27B-NInfer \
  qwen3_6_27b.ninfer \
  --local-dir models

# Or the 27B NVFP4 weight variant:
hf download neroued/Qwen3.6-27B-nvfp4-NInfer \
  qwen3_6_27b_nvfp4.ninfer \
  --local-dir models

# Or Qwen3.8-27B:
hf download neroued/Qwen3.8-27B-NInfer \
  qwen3_8_27b.ninfer \
  --local-dir models

# Or Qwen3.8-27B NVFP4:
hf download neroued/Qwen3.8-27B-nvfp4-NInfer \
  qwen3_8_27b_nvfp4.ninfer \
  --local-dir models

# Or:
hf download neroued/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-NInfer \
  qwen3_6_35b_a3b.ninfer \
  --local-dir models

Current NInfer builds accept only the version-2 artifact container, and all five downloads above are version 2. Migration applies only to Qwen3.6 artifacts downloaded before their version-2 publication; both Qwen3.8-27B profiles were published directly as version 2. Migrate an older exact local file in place:

python3 -m tools.artifact.migrate_v1_to_v2 models/qwen3_6_27b.ninfer

Use the same command with qwen3_6_27b_nvfp4.ninfer or qwen3_6_35b_a3b.ninfer for those artifacts. The migration updates only container metadata; it does not rewrite the weight payload. Alternatively, download the current version-2 file again from its Hugging Face repository.

Each .ninfer file contains the weights and frontend resources needed by NInfer. It is not a Transformers checkpoint, Safetensors distribution, or GGUF file.

Each artifact is complete, while GPU residency is fixed at process startup. Speculative decoding is disabled by default, so MTP/DFlash state and the optimized proposal head are not uploaded. Vision is also disabled by default, so its weights, Vision scratch phase, and frozen request-transient allocation are omitted. Add --vision to the CLI or server process that must accept image or video input. Disabled capabilities cannot be enabled by a later request. DFlash is available only for the 35B-A3B target and is text-only.

Run the CLI

./build/apps/ninfer models/qwen3_6_27b.ninfer \
  --prompt "Explain prefill and decode in three sentences." \
  --max-context 16384 \
  --max-new 256 \
  --spec mtp --draft-tokens 3 \
  --lm-head-draft

Use --messages FILE instead of --prompt for chat history, images, or videos:

./build/apps/ninfer models/qwen3_6_27b.ninfer \
  --messages examples/cli/messages/image_chart.json \
  --max-context 8192 \
  --max-new 128 \
  --vision

Answer content is written to stdout. Loading progress, reasoning, timing, throughput, memory, and speculative-decoding statistics are written to stderr. See the CLI guide and committed examples for structured input and runtime options.

Run the HTTP server

./build/apps/ninfer-serve models/qwen3_6_27b.ninfer \
  --max-context 16384 \
  --kv-capacity auto \
  --max-concurrency 2 \
  --spec mtp --draft-tokens 3 \
  --lm-head-draft

The public model ID defaults to the artifact's identity.model_id; use --model-id only to publish a deployment-specific alias.

Then send an OpenAI-style request:

curl http://127.0.0.1:8080/v1/chat/completions \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{
    "model": "qwen3.6-27b",
    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Reply with one short sentence."}],
    "max_tokens": 64
  }'

The server also implements OpenAI Responses Core (typed Items, semantic SSE, local continuation state, and function calls) plus Anthropic Messages, token counting, and multimodal input. See HTTP serving.

Capabilities

All three registered model IDs support:

• text generation with thinking and non-thinking prompt modes;
• image, multi-image, video, and mixed multimodal messages;
• chunked prefill and CUDA Graph decode;
• startup-bounded small-scale concurrent serving with true batched decode;
• MTP speculative decoding with draft windows from one to five;
• BF16 and INT8 group-64 KV cache;
• model- and thinking-mode-aware official sampling defaults, with explicit greedy, temperature, top-k, top-p, min-p, and presence/frequency-penalty overrides;
• compatible-prefix reuse;
• OpenAI Responses Core, OpenAI Chat Completions, and Anthropic Messages, including streaming and usage accounting;
• prompt-rendered function tools and parsed tool calls.

The 35B-A3B target additionally supports text-only DFlash speculative decoding with draft windows from one to fifteen.

Current limits

• Only the five (model_id, weights_id) artifact identities listed above are accepted product identities.
• Execution is specialized for one RTX 5090 and one CUDA device.
• One Engine owns one resident model and supports a startup-fixed capacity of 1–8 active requests. Decode-ready requests are compacted at round boundaries and executed in one batched model traversal.
• NInfer does not provide large-scale or preemptive continuous batching, priority/QoS scheduling, multi-GPU execution, CPU/GPU offload, or distributed serving.
• --max-context is the logical ceiling of each sequence and is configurable up to the registered models' native 262,144-token limit. --kv-capacity N explicitly sizes the shared Main Text KV pool for all active and retained sequences, while --kv-capacity auto selects the largest usable capacity from the memory remaining after weights are loaded while preserving 1 GiB of sizing headroom. Omission defaults to one --max-context worth of pages. The resolved pool is fixed at startup and is not divided statically among request lanes.
• Tool calls are parsed and returned to the client; NInfer does not execute tools.
• The C++ headers are used by the in-tree applications and are not distributed as an installed SDK.

Documentation

• Contributing
• Documentation index
• CLI
• HTTP serving
• Performance
• CLI examples

License

NInfer is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.

The published artifacts are derived from Qwen/Qwen3.6-27B, Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B, and Qwen/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B. The Qwen3.6-27B NVFP4 artifact also uses the fixed packed weights from rdtand/Qwen3.6-27B-PrismaSCOUT-Blackwell-NVFP4-BF16-vllm. The Qwen3.8-27B NVFP4 artifact also uses the fixed mixed FP8/NVFP4 weights from unsloth/Qwen3.8-27B-NVFP4. These source repositories are distributed under Apache-2.0. Vendored dependencies retain their own license files under third_party/.