I said it in August: local AI performance is a software problem, not a hardware problem. Now a 2020 RTX 3090 runs Qwen3.8 27B up to 4.6x faster. Same card, same model. Nobody bought a fucking thing. A guy on r/LocalLLaMA started at 82 tok/s. He tuned MTP, added a DFlash2 drafter and a lookup drafter, and pushed verify to 16 tokens per step. 382 tok/s on a task that quotes a 25K token document. To be fair, the 4.6x is on that quoting task. In normal chat he gets about 133 tok/s. Thats still 1.6x for free, and context went up to 138K. I saw the same thing on my rig all summer. DeepSeek V4 got 29x faster on my 4x 3090 and I didnt write a single custom kernel, the GPUs were just waiting 92% of the time. DeepSeek V4 Flash prefill went from 433 to 1906 tok/s in 1 day. A MiniMax H3 clip went from 11:21 to 3:45 overnight. The hardware never changed. And all of it works only because the weights are open. You cant run a drafter or tune MTP for a model you only get through an API. Nvidia wants you to buy a new card every year. Most of the speed is already in the card you have. The software just doesnt use it yet.