Finally finished a serious offline DSLR test with the new models.
This is only for someone with bad hardware. If you have a high-end rig the tests and conclusion do not apply to you at all.
On a 9 year old PC that was expensive back then, but never received any hardware upgrade.
250000 characters of text, that has a lot of @1 placeholders \n[] commands and \c[] commands.
Test 1
Primary model Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct abliterated v2 I1 (Q5_K_S)
Fallback model Gemma3 27B abliterated dpo I1 (Q4_K_S)
The translation took ~8.5 hours. Not a single complete failure.
Test 2
Primary model Qwen3 VL 4B Instruct abliterated v1 (Q8_0)
Fallback model Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct abliterated v2 (Q8_0)
The translation took ~3.5 hours. 7 cells failed completely and need manual fixing.
Obervations:
Test 1 was a failure on this hardware.
The Primary model actually screwed up a lot constantly requiring the large fallback model to step in which is why it took so long.
8.5 hours for a mediocre translation of a medium sized game is not acceptable.
If you think about the monetary value of the power consumption, wear, and it simply blocking the PC, you could pay deepseek instead and have a faster better translation.
Test 2 was also a failure, although a less bad one.
3.5 hours is still really long considering it had complete failures.
The Primary model actually performed basically the same as the primary in the first test.
The fallback model was too big to offload into the old GPU and as a result pretty slow and did not have a particularly good rate at fixing stuff. Meaning on those 7 complete failures it just wasted a really long time failing.
Current Conclusion:
If you have outdated hardware I would use the biggest abliterated Qwen3 model you can fully fit in your GPU as a primary model and then use DeepSeekV3-0324 as fallback option with the free requests on OpenRouter.
That would be quite fast, free, you would not have a single complete failure, and if the game you are translating has a lot of \c[] commands and stuff like that you will likely still get a significantly better translation than with SugoiV4 based SLR.
If you absolutely want to keep it offline I would honestly just turn the fallback option off and once it finishes manually fix the cells with the TRANSLATIONFAILURE error code (Worst case just run normal SLR on them). That would be so much faster than trying to make a huge model do it for you.
If none of the models fit in your GPU, stick to SLR, it's not worth it.