They aren't "Just as accurate". What you see with these quants is the providers only ever show performance on already saturated benchmarks. You'll see labs put out 1-bit quants Deepseek v4.1 claiming only 1% degradation because they're only showing the benchmarks which tell that story. Then you look at the performance on those same benchmarks for significantly weaker models like Qwen3.8-27B even and it's virtually the same because that benchmark is saturated.
I like these quants as much as the next guy when they're all I can run but I have both R9700 with 32GB VRAM and a 5060 Ti with only 16GB VRAM and so I run both Q6 Unlsoth quants and ISTA IQ3_XXS quants and yeah there is an absolute world of difference in realworld performance.
IMHO I think it's pretty scummy behavior from the quant providers to frame these quants this way. Just be honest about where the degradation is really occurring on the non-saturated benchmarks.
This is a really good point that goes the other way as well. Some use cases are great for smaller and cheaper models, but it's not obviously when that's the case so I can bank the savings.
All I know is that Strata and these models are the most I have ever gotten out of my machine. I get 70 t/s on a standard gaming rig 9070 XT / 5900X / 64 GB DDR4 @3400.