SDXL Turbo
2.6B SDXL backbone trained with Adversarial Diffusion Distillation (ADD), producing photorealistic 512px images in a single forward pass. Designed for real-time, interactive text-to-image.
Still the speed benchmark — nothing matches ADD for one-step latency at 512px. Held back by the Stability non-commercial license; for production use look at FLUX.1 [schnell] or SD-3.5-medium.
Overview
2.6B SDXL backbone trained with Adversarial Diffusion Distillation (ADD), producing photorealistic 512px images in a single forward pass. Designed for real-time, interactive text-to-image.
Strengths
- 1-step sampling at 512x512 — sub-100ms on an RTX 4090, real-time on M-series Macs
- ADD distillation: outperforms the 50-step LCM-XL and matches base SDXL on user-pref studies (per paper)
- Fits in <8GB VRAM at FP16 — runs on most consumer GPUs
- Mature SDXL tooling: ComfyUI nodes, diffusers pipeline, ControlNets carry over
Weaknesses
- Stability non-commercial research license — no commercial use without a Stability membership
- Native 512px; pushing past degrades quickly vs FLUX or SD3.5
- Single-step trade-off: less fine detail, weaker prompt adherence than full SDXL
- Lags FLUX/SD3.5 on text rendering and anatomy
Quantization variants
Each quantization trades model quality for file size and VRAM. Q4_K_M is the most popular starting point.
| Quantization | File size | VRAM required |
|---|---|---|
| Q4_K_M | 1.4 GB | 2 GB |
Get the model
HuggingFace
Original weights
Source repository — direct quantization required.
Hardware that runs this
Cards with enough VRAM for at least one quantization of SDXL Turbo.
Models worth comparing
Same parameter band, plus what's one tier above and below — so you can decide what actually fits your hardware.
Frequently asked
What's the minimum VRAM to run SDXL Turbo?
Can I use SDXL Turbo commercially?
What's the context length of SDXL Turbo?
Source: huggingface.co/stabilityai/sdxl-turbo
Reviewed by RunLocalAI Editorial. See our editorial policy for how we research and verify model claims.
Related — keep moving
Verify SDXL Turbo runs on your specific hardware before committing money.