alt Hacker NewsI've been using Qwen3.6 35B A3B, and with reasoning turned on, I'd say 2/3 (give or take) of the tokens for a response are thinking tokens. Which at 70+ tps locally, that isn't that awful. I run an 80k context across 4-10 "agents" for my solo TTRPG, where Qwen is the GM, each NPC at a location, the director, and the narrator.
Each turn is about 45-60 seconds to generate all of the various responses. The GM and director have reasoning on, and the NPCs/Location/Narrator do not.
It's a fairly good "engine" for that. I'm not sure how a denser Qwen would do here regarding speed.
I like the tabletop RPG use case, and wanted to say: If your hardware likes it you should check out Gemma 4 for creative DMing use case. I found it to be much better at holding the plotlines and being creative on gaming turns. My experimental case was an audio-only Zork and Gemma 12B and even E4B were pretty good!