Stable Diffusion XL · 53 cards measured first-party · Updated October 2026

How Fast Is Stable Diffusion XL on Each GPU?

SDXL is the image model everyone actually runs. It needs ~8GB minimum and ~12GB to be comfortable, which puts it within reach of most of the market: and unlike our LLM ladder, it rewards raw tensor compute rather than memory bandwidth. That flips the ranking completely.

Benchmarked weights: stabilityai/stable-diffusion-xl-base-1.0

Fastest we measured

NVIDIA B200

46.12 images/min on Stable Diffusion XL, the ceiling. Measured on our bench. 192GB of VRAM, $40,000 at launch.

Pros

• 46.12 images/min on Stable Diffusion XL
• 192GB, clears the Stable Diffusion XL floor
• Rentable by the hour rather than bought

Cons

• 1000W board rating
• Datacenter or workstation hardware, not a retail purchase

Best for: Stable Diffusion XL work where you want the ceiling gone rather than the cheapest entry.

Best consumer card

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090

21.08 images/min on Stable Diffusion XL, fastest card you can buy at retail. Measured on our bench. 32GB of VRAM, $1,999 at launch.

Pros

• 21.08 images/min on Stable Diffusion XL
• 32GB, clears the Stable Diffusion XL floor

Cons

• 575W board rating

Cheapest card that runs it

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060

4.28 images/min on Stable Diffusion XL, lowest launch price that still fits. Anchored estimate. 8GB of VRAM, $249 at launch.

Pros

• 4.28 images/min on Stable Diffusion XL
• 8GB, clears the Stable Diffusion XL floor

Cons

• 145W board rating

Best value

GeForce RTX 5070

7.43 images/min on Stable Diffusion XL, most speed per dollar. Measured on our bench. 12GB of VRAM, $549 at launch. That is 13.53 images/min per $1,000 of launch price.

Pros

• 7.43 images/min on Stable Diffusion XL
• 12GB, clears the Stable Diffusion XL floor

Cons

• 250W board rating

Diffusion is tensor-compute bound. Every step is dense matrix maths, so the ranking tracks tensor throughput and architecture generation, not bandwidth. This is why an Ampere card with plenty of VRAM gets buried by a newer card with less, and it's the opposite of what the LLM charts show. One card, two completely different orderings, depending on the job.

Because this workload is tensor-compute bound, the ranking tracks architecture generation and tensor throughput rather than memory bandwidth, the reverse of our LLM charts. The same two cards can swap places entirely depending on which of these pages you're reading. That's the reason we run twelve workloads instead of publishing one score. A GPU isn't fast or slow. It's fast at some things and gated out of others, and which of those matters depends entirely on what you're actually going to run.

Our verdict

NVIDIA B200 tops our Stable Diffusion XL leaderboard at 46.12 images/min (measured), 4251% of the way clear of the slowest card that still fits. But the number that decides most purchases isn't on the chart. It's the 5 cards that can't run Stable Diffusion XL at all. This is a compute workload: buy architecture generation, not raw VRAM, as long as you clear the floor first.

FAQ

What is the fastest GPU for Stable Diffusion XL?

NVIDIA B200, at 46.12 images/min on our bench, a first-party measurement. It carries 192GB of VRAM. Of the 83 cards we have Stable Diffusion XL data for, 78 can run it at all.

How much VRAM do I need for Stable Diffusion XL?

~8GB minimum, ~12GB for full-fat. One of the few workloads in our suite that nearly everything can run.

Why does the Stable Diffusion XL ranking look different from your other benchmarks?

Because this workload is tensor-compute bound, the ranking tracks architecture generation and tensor throughput rather than memory bandwidth, the reverse of our LLM charts. The same two cards can swap places entirely depending on which of these pages you're reading. That's why we publish twelve separate workloads rather than one blended score, the ordering genuinely changes depending on the job.

Are these Stable Diffusion XL numbers measured or estimated?

Both, and every row says which. 53 of the 83 cards here were rented and run by us on the same harness. The remainder are anchored estimates interpolated per workload against those measurements. We never blend the two silently, if a row says Estimated, we have not run that card.

Can I rent a GPU to run Stable Diffusion XL instead of buying one?

Yes, and for the cards at the top of this leaderboard it's the only realistic option, most of them have no retail channel at all. It's also how we got these numbers: we rented the hardware by the hour rather than buying it. That's worth considering before you spend on a card to find out whether it's fast enough.

Why publish cards that can't run Stable Diffusion XL?

Because it's the most useful thing we know. A card that can't load a model doesn't run it slowly, it doesn't run it. Most benchmark sites leave that as a blank cell or quietly drop to a smaller quantisation to produce a number. We publish it as a hard gate and score it zero, because 'this card cannot do the thing you want' is the answer to the question you were actually asking.

How we test

Every ranking on this page comes from our own benchmark runs, not vendor claims. Cards marked Measured were rented and run by us; cards marked Estimated are interpolated per workload against those measured anchors and are labelled on every row, we never blend the two silently. LLMs run on llama.cpp (llama-bench) at Q4_K_M with -p 512 -n 128. Diffusion and video run on diffusers/ComfyUI at BF16, with SDXL at FP16. Each workload gets a warmup pass plus multiple timed runs (5 for small LLMs, 3 for large models and images, 2 for video); we publish the mean as the result and the minimum as the 1% low. Run-to-run variance is under 0.5%. Telemetry, power, temperature, utilisation, clocks, peak VRAM, is sampled at 1 Hz for the duration of every run. Where a model exceeds a card's VRAM we publish a hard won't-fit result rather than quietly dropping to a smaller quantisation. A card that can't run a model scores zero on it. Silently swapping precision to make a number appear would make every number on this site meaningless. All figures are single-GPU, single-stream, batch-size-1. That is the honest way to measure what one card does for one user, and it is deliberately not how a datacenter serves a model. Vendor and MLPerf figures use large batches across many GPUs and will be far higher. Neither is wrong, they answer different questions. Ours answers 'what will this card do for me'.