OpenRouter tests what fp8 and fp4 quantization do to LLM quality and price
LLM Quantization: What fp8 and fp4 Do to Quality and Price
OpenRouter ran 280 exact-answer tasks against six endpoints of Qwen3.8 27B on October 20, 2026 and did not detect an accuracy difference between fp16, fp8 and fp4, with all six scoring between 98.3% and 99.2%. Across 1,455 endpoints, 59.5% report no precision at all and fp8 is the most common labeled format at 23.6%. Lower precision was cheaper for most models but not all, and provider choice moved price more than precision did, with the priciest same-precision endpoint a median 1.72 times the cheapest.
OpenRouter measured fp8, fp4 and fp16 endpoints of one model across 240 exact-answer tasks and found no detectable accuracy gap, while price differences tracked the provider more than the precision.
Source:OpenRouter Announcements · openrouter.ai