Can NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 run Stable Diffusion XL?
6.6B parameter Image Gen model on 8GB GDDR6
VRAM Requirements
Stable Diffusion XL is a 6.6B parameter model. At full precision (FP16), it requires 16GB of VRAM. Your NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 has 8GB, so you'll need to quantize it to 8-bit (Q8) to fit.
Maximum quality, no quantization
Near-lossless, ~50% size reduction
Good quality, ~75% size reduction
Recommended system RAM: 32GB DDR5 (2x GPU VRAM minimum for model overflow)
What This Means in Practice
Stable Diffusion XL at 8-bit precision on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 produces images virtually identical to full precision. Generation speed is fast and you'll have some VRAM headroom for larger batch sizes or higher resolutions.
How to Set It Up
Step 1: Install ComfyUI
git clone https://github.com/comfyanonymous/ComfyUI.git && cd ComfyUI && pip install -r requirements.txtComfyUI is the recommended UI for Stable Diffusion and FLUX models.
Step 2: Download the model
Download Stable Diffusion XL weights from HuggingFace and place them in ComfyUI/models/. The model is approximately 16GB at full precision.
Step 3: Launch and generate
python main.pyOpen http://localhost:8188 in your browser. You can use the full precision weights.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Specs
Other GPUs That Run Stable Diffusion XL
Other Image Gen Models on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070
About Stable Diffusion XL
Workhorse image gen model. 8GB minimum, 12GB+ recommended.