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Comment by sxp | Hacker News Reader

Is there a good set of benchmarks available for Stable Diffusion? I was able to run a custom Stable Diffusion build on a GCE A100 instance (~$1/hour) at around 1Mpix per 10 seconds. I.e, I could create a 512x512 image in 2.5 seconds with some batching optimizations. A consumer GPU like a 3090 runs at ~1Mpix per 20 seconds.

I'm wondering what the price floor of stock art will be when someone can use https://lexica.art/ as a starting point, generate variations of a prompt locally, and then spend a few minutes sifting through the results. It should be possible to get most stock art or concept art at a price of <$1 per image.

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It can be even cheaper.

Midjourney, in case you appreciate their output, has an unlimited plan for 30$ a month. The only limitation is that if you're an extremely heavy user, they may "relax" you, which means results come in a bit slower.

Note that they've been also experimenting with a --beta parameter which basically means the algorithm uses StableDiffusion's algorithm behind the scenes, or you can use any of 4 versions of MidJourney's more stylistic algorithms.

So if you don't want to tinker or don't have a high-end GPU, it's a cheap way to play around. I have StableDiffusion running locally but still prefer MidJourney. I enjoy the stylistic output but it's also a highly social way to generate art. Everybody is doing it in the open.

Anyway, the stock art part is a hairy subject. You should assume that you AI image is not copyrighted. Which begs the question why they would pay at all.

>The only limitation is that if you're an extremely heavy user, they may "relax" you, which means results come in a bit slower.

You don't have to be an extremely heavy user. I used it for about an hour every evening and it took 11 days out of a month subscription for them to put me on relax mode.

The relax mode is based on how busy the service is. If usage is low, it's the same a fast mode. But other times its really slow.

That makes it unpredictable enough that it stopped being fun for me to use it. I've barely used midjourney since I got put on relaxed mode - it stopped feeling like I can jump on and play because I might hit a busy period and then it'll take 5 minutes to generate a prompt

That said, I could buy more hours of fast mode and I think it's still way cheaper than Dall-E or Dreamstudio

Related: I wrote up instructions for running Stable Diffusion on GCE. I used a Tesla T4, which is probably the cheapest that can handle the original code. If you're spinning up an instance to play with, rather than to batch-process, then cheaper makes more sense because most of the machine's time is spent waiting for you to type stuff and look at the results.

https://sowbug.com/posts/stable-diffusion-on-google-cloud/

So you’re estimating over a thousand generated images an hour and less than a tenth of a cent per image using the A100. If that turns out to be accurate, it seems like some online image generation will included in the price of the stock art.

(DreamStudio is charging a bit over one cent per generated image at default settings, depending on exchange rates.)

My 3170Ti will create 512x512 image in about 5-6 seconds with 50 inference steps

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