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Stable Diffusion XL Turbo can generate AI images as fast as you can type
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
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I tried it on a 6900 XT recently and generation time was well under half a second.
Results are not as good as with SDXL but for the time it needs it's very impressive.
The author can't type very quickly
I'd guess that the 'realtime' is a quote from StabilityAI and of course they're running that stuff on an A100. A couple of seconds is still interactive rate as generally speaking you want to think about the changes you're making to your conditioning.
Haven't tried yet but if individual steps of XL Turbo take ballpark as much time as LCM steps then... well, it's four to eight times faster. As quality generally isn't production-ready we're generally speaking about rough prompt prototyping, testing out an animation pipeline, such stuff, but that has the caveat that increasing step size often leads to markedly different results (complete change of composition, not just details) so the information you gain from those preview-quality images is limited.
Oh, "production ready quality": image quality being roughly en par with 4-step LCM means that it's nowhere near production grade. For the final render you still want to give the model more steps. OTOH I've found that some LCM-based merges do in 30 steps what other models need 80 steps for so improvements are always welcome. But I'm also worried about these distilled models being less flexible, pruning only slightly trodden paths that you actually might want the model to take.
EDIT: Addendum: I'm not seeing anything about using this stuff as a Lora. The nice thing about LCM is that you can take any model you have on your disk and turn it pretty much instantly into a model that can generate fast previews. Also, VAE decoding already can be slower than generation with LCM, so, yeah. I guess having something in between the full VAE and TAESD would be nice, TAESD is fast but is quite limited both when it comes to details, so much that you might not even be able to see what kind of texture SD generated. Oh and it also tends to get colours wrong, at least in my experience it tends to be oversaturated.
Well, it is technically as fast as you can type if you're running a better GPU. The 3060 is pretty mid-tier at this point.
Low end card.
I'll get crucified for saying that because people will interpret that as an attack on their PC or something daft like that. It's not.
It's Ampere, a GPU architecture from 3.5 years ago. And even then, here's what the desktop stack was like:
3090 Ti (GA102)
3090 (GA102)
3080 Ti (GA102)
3080 12GB (GA102)
3080 (GA102)
3070 Ti (GA102/GA104)
3070 (GA104)
3060 Ti (GA104/GA103)
3060 (GA106/GA104)
3050 (GA106/GA107)
It was almost at the bottom of Nvidia's stack 3 years ago. It was a low end card then (because, you know, it was at the bottom end of what they were offering). It's an even more low end card now.
People are always fooled by Nvidia's marketing and thinking they're getting a mid range card when in reality Nvidia's giving people the scraps and pretending they're giving you a great deal. People need to demand more from these companies.
Nvidia takes a low end card, slaps a $400 price tag on it, calls it mid range, and people lap it up every time.
The pricing makes it a mid range card, because the budget end is just gone these days.
Nvidia conning people into paying what used to be mid range/high end pricing for a low end card does not make it a low end card.
The 3060 was always a low end card. Because it was on the low end of the product stack, both for Nvidia and against AMD.
I know it's low-end when compared to the newer generations but if we call a 3060 low-end then what do we call people with older GPUs like a 1070?
Should we not compare the 3060 against its own generation/the current one? To me that makes more sense than including the 1000 series or 900 series or something. How far would we go back? Are all cards sold now high end because they're faster than a GTX 960? Earlier?
Personally my cut off was cards still on sale either right now or very recently, say within the past year.
I'm on a 3060 and with 4x upscaling it takes about a second and a half.