I came to AI image generation the way I come to most things: late, sceptical,
and determined to do it the awkward way. The cloud services were right there
— slick websites, free tiers, results in seconds. But the whole point of my
recent conversion is that things run here, on hardware I own, where nobody
is logging my prompts or training on my cat.
The hardware I own, in this case, is a laptop with a mobile GPU and 6GB of
VRAM. The model I wanted to run, SDXL, is widely described as needing at
least 8GB, ideally 12, realistically “more than you have, mate”.
The internet was very confident I couldn’t do it. The internet said the model
alone barely fits, that I’d be swapping to disk, that I should run an older,
smaller model and know my station. My laptop and I took that personally.
Attempt one went exactly as prophesied. The model loaded — barely — and the
moment I asked for an image, the terminal produced the error message that
would become my constant companion for the next week:
torch.OutOfMemoryError: CUDA out of memory. Tried to allocate 1.50 GiB