FLUX.1 Schnell · 8 GPUs measured first-party · text-to-image · Updated October 2026
What GPU Do You Need for FLUX.1 Schnell?
FLUX.1 Schnell is the speed king of open image generation, a distilled 4-step version of Black Forest Labs' FLUX that produced the fastest text-to-image results in our database: 81 images per minute on a B200, 0.74 seconds per image. We measured it on 8 GPUs at bf16 with the full pipeline resident, which is where its ~37GB peak VRAM figure comes from.
Benchmarked weights: black-forest-labs/FLUX.1-schnell
NVIDIA B200
81.41 images/min on FLUX.1 Schnell, the ceiling. Measured on our bench. 192GB of VRAM, $40,000 at launch.
- 81.41 images/min on FLUX.1 Schnell
- 192GB, clears the FLUX.1 Schnell floor
- Rentable by the hour rather than bought
- 1000W board rating
- Datacenter or workstation hardware, not a retail purchase
NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition
42.41 images/min on FLUX.1 Schnell, lowest launch price that still fits. Measured on our bench. 96GB of VRAM, $8,565 at launch.
- 42.41 images/min on FLUX.1 Schnell
- 96GB, clears the FLUX.1 Schnell floor
- Rentable by the hour rather than bought
- 600W board rating
- Datacenter or workstation hardware, not a retail purchase
What GPU Do You Need for FLUX.1 Schnell?, images/min by GPU
Measured on our own bench. A card absent from this chart has not been run on this model yet, or cannot fit it.
Efficiency: images/min per 100W drawn
Power is the average pulled during the run, sampled at 1Hz. The fastest card is often not the one here, and for anything left running this is the number that shows up on the bill.
Value: images/min per $1,000 of MSRP
Launch price, not street price, so it ages. A speed leaderboard always crowns the most expensive card; this is the counterweight.
FLUX.1 Schnell. Measured image generation speed by GPU
| GPU | Images/min | s per image | img/W·min | Avg power |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA B200 | 81.41 | 0.74 | 0.106 | 769.5 W |
| NVIDIA H200 | 60.51 | 0.99 | 0.107 | 566.8 W |
| NVIDIA B300 | 59.54 | 1.01 | 0.096 | 619.0 W |
| NVIDIA H100 80GB HBM3 | 58.36 | 1.03 | 0.095 | 614.2 W |
| NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition | 42.41 | 1.41 | 0.084 | 502.7 W |
| NVIDIA A100 40GB SXM4 | 28.44 | 2.11 | 0.074 | 383.5 W |
| NVIDIA A100 80GB SXM4 | 28.39 | 2.11 | 0.072 | 393.8 W |
| NVIDIA L40S | 26.24 | 2.29 | 0.079 | 330.8 W |
Best-in-class speed, one known weakness. For raw image throughput, nothing open that we've measured touches Schnell, sub-second generation on Blackwell silicon changes what's practical: real-time preview loops, bulk asset generation, live creative tools. The caveat we'd flag from experience: text rendering inside images is its soft spot. The 4-step distillation that makes it fast costs it the legible signage, labels and typography that its bigger sibling FLUX.1 dev (and newer models like Z-Image Turbo) handle better. Composition prompt with no words in it? Schnell. Poster with a headline? Use dev.
About that VRAM number. Our ~37GB peak reflects the full bf16 pipeline held in memory, the way you'd serve it in production. That's datacenter or 48GB-workstation territory as tested. Consumer setups run Schnell every day via quantized weights and CPU offloading at lower speeds; we haven't measured those configurations yet, so this page won't guess at them. On rented silicon the math is sweet: 81 images/minute on a B200 means a thousand images costs about 12 minutes of GPU time.
About FLUX.1 Schnell. FLUX.1 Schnell: from black-forest-labs, 12B parameters, on Hugging Face since July 2024, Apache 2.0 licence (gated: accept the terms first). 832,550 downloads in the last 30 days and 5 community quantizations.
How it compares. L40S: FLUX.1 Schnell 26.24 images/min, FLUX.1 dev 3.84 (12B), FLUX.2 klein 9B 25.95 (9B), Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large 4.54 (8B), ERNIE-Image Turbo 4.41 (8B). FLUX.1 Schnell beats all 4 here.
Cost on a rented GPU. 1,000 images of FLUX.1 Schnell: $0.28 on a A100 40GB SXM4 ($0.47/hr, 35 min), $1.22 on a B200 ($5.98/hr, 12 min, 4.4x the cost).
FLUX.1 Schnell: cost per 1,000 images on rented GPUs
| GPU | Cheapest rate | Speed (images/min) | Cost per 1,000 images |
|---|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA A100 40GB SXM4 | $0.47/hr | 28.44 | $0.28 |
| NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition | $1.08/hr | 42.41 | $0.42 |
| NVIDIA L40S | $0.79/hr | 26.24 | $0.50 |
| NVIDIA A100 80GB SXM4 | $0.95/hr | 28.39 | $0.56 |
| NVIDIA H100 80GB HBM3 | $2.14/hr | 58.36 | $0.61 |
| NVIDIA H200 | $3.59/hr | 60.51 | $0.99 |
| NVIDIA B200 | $5.98/hr | 81.41 | $1.22 |
| NVIDIA B300 | $6.94/hr | 59.54 | $1.94 |
Cheapest hourly rate we track on RunPod and Vast.ai, divided by the measured speed. Startup time and storage are extra.
Speed tiers for FLUX.1 Schnell. 30+ images/min: 5 (B200, H200, B300); 6-30 images/min: 3 (A100 40GB SXM4, A100 80GB SXM4, L40S). 30 images/min means two seconds or less per picture.
Time per image. FLUX.1 Schnell at 1024px and 4 steps: 0.7s per image on the B200, 2.3s on the L40S. A batch of 100 takes 1 min on the fastest card and 4 min on the slowest.
VRAM for FLUX.1 Schnell. Measured peak 34.9GB, so 48GB is the smallest common card size; smallest card it ran on: A100 40GB SXM4 (40GB).
Power on FLUX.1 Schnell. Most efficient: H200, 567W, 0.16 kWh per 1,000 images. Hungriest: B200, 770W, 0.16 kWh. At $0.15/kWh: $0.023 per 1,000 images.
Our verdict
FLUX.1 Schnell: 81 images/min, 0.74s per image, the fastest open text-to-image we've measured, with weak in-image text as the tradeoff of its 4-step distillation. As benchmarked (full bf16 pipeline, ~37GB) it's rented-GPU territory; its throughput-per-dollar there is unmatched.
FAQ
- How fast is FLUX.1 Schnell really?
- 0.74 seconds per image on a B200, 81 images/minute sustained in our 10-batch protocol. The H200 and B300 land near 60/min. It's the fastest text-to-image result in our database by a wide margin.
- Why does it need ~37GB of VRAM?
- That's the full bf16 pipeline (transformer + text encoders + VAE) resident in memory, as we benchmarked it. Community setups fit it on consumer cards via quantization and offloading at reduced speed, configurations we haven't measured yet.
- What's its weakness?
- Text inside images. The 4-step speed distillation costs typography: signage, labels and headlines come out mangled far more often than with FLUX.1 dev. For text-heavy images, use dev or Z-Image Turbo and accept the slower generation.
- Schnell or FLUX.1 dev?
- Schnell for volume and iteration speed; dev for final quality and anything with words in it. A common pipeline: explore compositions on Schnell, re-render the keepers on dev.
- Is renting cost-effective for it?
- Extremely: at 81 images/minute, one B200 hour produces roughly 4,800 images. For bulk generation there is no cheaper open-model throughput in our data.