strata 0.2.0 on my rtx 30 cards: +12 to +17% decode, but my agents don't finish any faster

what i wanted to know

Strata, the engine i use to run Qwen 3.8 Flash Next on my two cards, was releasing its 0.2.0 in beta, promising gains on small cards. i wanted to know what it gave on my exact setup, keeping everything else identical (two slots, 262K of context, both cards at 220 W).

the numbers

on short requests (256 token answers, median of three rounds):

under real coding agent load (five sessions on a real repo, context up to 122K), the median decode of a single agent goes from 101 to 110 tok/s, and with four agents from 22.2 to 27.4 tok/s.

what surprised me

all the gain comes from a table of nine settings that 0.2.0 turns on by default for Ampere cards (the RTX 30 series): if you turn it off with STRATA_SM86_PERF=0, 0.2.0 drops back to 92.4 tok/s, which is exactly the old number.

but the most interesting part is that the total time to finish the four-agent load didn't move (212 s before, 215 s after). a coding agent spends most of its time reading prompts and tool results, not writing, and this update only speeds up the writing. faster tokens don't mean faster agents.

what i keep

0.2.0, obviously, because it's free and the answers stay the same according to Strata. but if i want agents that finish faster, prompt reading is what needs work.