n0xy

All modern GPU drivers support Vulkan, at least on Linux. I don’t know how bad Vulkan does in comparison to CUDA, since I’ve never used that stuff. The bigger issue is software-side support. Ollama, llama-cpp and KoboldCPP all support Vulkan by now. ComfyUI doesn’t seem to support it.

I stick to what I have as long as it continues to work for me, therefore I haven’t looked into GPUs the last years. New Radeon RX 580 is still at 200€, I paid 300€ 8 years ago. Looks like RX 580 2048SP 8GB is actually one of the cheapest one can get currently, but not entirely sure. (My GPU has 2304 shading units.) It’s so old that ROCm support was dropped and you really need software that can do AI via Vulkan

edit: looks like Intel Arc A750 is 5 years younger, has better performance and more memory bandwidth

For playing around, no. My GPU is 9 years old and has 8GB VRAM. I generating my 384x512 profile picture with KoboldCPP (Vulkan) and Z-Image-Turbo model locally.

I just regenerated my profile picture with KoboldCPP a bit differently. I used some clearer LoRA configurations than I did initially. For Z-Image-Turbo it’s CFG 4 and for Flux2 Klein 4b CFG 1, both used Euler. For Anime V1 LoRA I started with anime illustrious, and for Koni Animestyle LoRA with anime_style, . :

384×512 & Z-Image-Turbo & Anime V1 & 8 steps (2min 42s):

384×512 & Z-Image-Turbo × Anime V1 & 25 steps (8min 16s):

384x512 × Flux2 Klein 4b × Koni Animestyle × 4 steps (22s):

384x512 × Flux2 Klein 4b × Koni Animestyle × 8 steps (35s):

384x512 × Flux2 Klein 4b × Koni Animestyle × 25 steps (1min 28s):

Upscaling it with RealESRGAN x4plus anime 6B upscaler only takes 10 seconds longer with this dimension.

KoboldCPP outputs how long generation takes like:

[11:09:15] Generating Image (8 steps)
  |==================================================| 480/480 - 0.00MB/s
  |==================================================| 480/480 - 0.00MB/s
  |==================================================| 480/480 - 810.94MB/s
  |==================================================| 480/480 - 0.00MB/s
  |==================================================| 8/8 - 19.64s/it
[11:11:57] Generating Media Complete