#local generation

Hi!!!!

First off, welcome aboard! It's always a lot of fun to have more interested and creative-minded folks playing with these toys! I love the super-specific-fetish-porn that dominates the genAI scene, don't get me wrong, but it's always nice to see people interested in exploring these tools in other ways too!! (Not to say you shouldn't make super specific fetish porn; goodness knows about a third of my generations are!)

Now, I did a little write up about how to get yourself started locally here:

I'm a big believer in the InvokeAI interface, in part because it's easy to set up and update, and in part because I find the in-painting to be the most precise and comfortable.

However, the reality is, Automatic1111 is the "standard choice" in terms of interfaces for local generation, and most tutorials will assume either that you use it, or that you are familiar enough with your own UI to be able to "translate" the guide.

Invoke is very much a "second line" option, behind A1111 and ComfyUI, but it's the one I am most familiar with as it had robust Linux support the soonest, and I'm a horrible little linux gremlin.

Now, you specify that you're doing alright techwise, so I'm going to get a little technical about specs.

Most of the tech demands for image generation come down to the amount of memory in your video card. I have an 8GB memory video card, which means I can run up through about Stable Diffusion 2.1, but not something more extreme like Flux.

More VRAM means more models you can run at all. More power means those models run faster.

It's generally claimed that you need 6GB of VRAM to get going, but there are Stable Diffusion 1 models that will run on 4GB, because that's what I was running 2 years ago when this tech dropped and it worked Okay Enough.

Your Laptop may have a video card with that kind of ram, especially if it's a gaming laptop, but most people use desktops to run genAI for a reason haha. It's a lot cheaper to get that kind of memory and power in a desktop format.

If you don't have enough VRAM, though, don't worry. You can generate using your processor and regular RAM too! It will, however, be much MUCH slower. Currently, my videocard generations take about 1 second per "step" for a 1024x768, and I usually run at around 25 steps. Processor generations take me a whopping 40 times that long, so a single image takes around 15 minutes.

What I'm getting at here is, if you can run on your video card, you really really want to run on your video card.

If your desktop can run generations but your laptop can't, you may also want to look into setting up remote access to your desktop via your laptop, so you can generate on the desktop but interface on the laptop on the go!