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Stable Diffusion XL Turbo can generate AI images as fast as you can type
(arstechnica.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.