Stability AI publicly released its latest image Ai model
SDXL yesterday
A big step up from
SD1.5 and the misfire of
SD2.1 which never really hit the ground running
You can read the blurb about it here: -
The Stability AI team is proud to release as an open model SDXL 1.0, the next iteration in the evolution of text-to-image generation models. Following the limited, research-only release of SDXL 0.9, the full version of SDXL has been improved to be the world's best open image generation model.
stability.ai
However, the main thing to know is
if you want to run it locally you are going to need a GPU with at least 8GB of RAM (preferably Nvidia though A1111 might work with AMD).
Some very basic test images are below: -
SDXL will run in
Automatic1111, however, from my testing the performance isn't great presently in terms of render time and you have to jump through some hoops to get it to work well, however so if you do want to check it out then I suggest installing
ComfyUI. As an Interface it can look a little bit daunting, however, it's basically an image-processing flow chart system and once you wrap your head around that aspect it makes sense.
I haven't yet had a chance to test out how SDXL performs with
InvokeAI yet, but I suspect it lies somewhere in between
A1111 &
ComfyUI
Sebastian Kamph has a couple of Videos, the first detailing how to install
ComfyUI and the second about installing
SDXL and getting it up and running (there are a couple of 6GB models to download). Note you can easily link
ComfyUI to your
Automatic1111/InvokeAI models folders so you don't need to double up: -
If you want to stick with
Automatic1111 then
Olivio Sarikas has a video about how to get
SDXL up and running in that: -
I dare say the performance issues of
A1111 will get ironed out in short order, however, the main problem is that whereas with
ComfyUI you can simply load up different workflows dependent on what you want to do,
A1111 frontloads everything and as
SDXL doesn't play nice if a whole raft of
SD1.5 extensions are installed you have to disable most of them, then reload the UI which is obviously a huge pain in the ass. On the flip side,
A1111 is still the king in terms of user-friendly extensions such as image browser, and extra network previews.
Note that no
SD1.5 embeds, Hypernetworks, Lora, Lycoris work with
SDXL as it is built on baseline images being 1024 x1024 whereas
SD1.5 was built on 512x512. With that said you can output images at say 1024x768, but at least one dimension needs to be larger than 1024 otherwise you will run into distortion issues.
Don't expect any sexy times from the base model. It is going to be a while before people within the Image AI community have trained up custom models fully for that sort of thing, however with that said some early custom models are already up at CivitAI such as AI legend Lykons Dreamshaper SDXL alpha, as well as a first stab by him at an Anime Art SDXL model:
DreamShaper XL - Now Turbo! Also check out the 1.5 DreamShaper page Check the version description below (bottom right) for more info and add a ❤️ to...
civitai.com
Anime Art Diffusion XL Check the version description below (bottom right) for more info and add a ❤️ to receive future updates. Do you like what I d...
civitai.com
The new version of MBBXL has been trained on >18000 training images in over 18000 steps. It's probably the most significant fine-tune of SDXL so...
civitai.com