Optimum SDXL Usage

Here's a quick listing of things to tune for your setup:

Commandline arguments:

• Nvidia (12gb+) --xformers
• Nvidia (8gb) --medvram-sdxl --xformers
• Nvidia (4gb) --lowvram --xformers
• AMD (4gb) --lowvram --opt-sub-quad-attention + TAESD in settings
  Both rocm and directml will generate at least 1024x1024 pictures at fp16. If your AMD card needs --no-half, try enabling --upcast-sampling instead, as full precision sdxl is too large to fit on 4gb.

System:

• (Windows) Downgrade Nvidia drivers to 531 or lower. New drivers cause extreme slowdowns on Windows when generating large images towards your card's maximum vram.
  This important issue is discussed here and in (#11063).
  Symptoms:

  • You see Shared GPU memory usage filling up in Task Manager
  • Your generations that usually take 1-2 min, take 7+ min
  • low vram cards are generating very slowly

• (Linux) install tcmalloc, greatly reducing RAM usage: sudo apt install --no-install-recommends google-perftools (#10117).

• Add a pagefile/swapfile to prevent failure loading weights due to low RAM.

• Use an SSD for faster load time, especially if a pagefile is required.

• Have at least 24gb ram on Windows 11, and at least 16gb on Windows 10

Model weights:

• Use sdxl-vae-fp16-fix; a VAE that will not need to run in fp32. This will increase speed and lessen VRAM usage at almost no quality loss.
• Use TAESD; a VAE that uses drastically less vram at the cost of some quality.