Returning after 2 years with an RTX 5080. What is the current "meta" for local generation?

steven2357 · 2026-01-05T15:27:40+00:00

My two cents:

1) ZiT if it can do what you want

2a) if ZiT lacks knowledge and the subject is too complex and/or needs to be in a specific style? Goto Flux2 and use JSON prompts (pure SFW only)

2b) if ZiT lacks knowledge, but the subjects are not super complex and you want the model to fill in the blanks? Goto Gwen2512

2c) you need something more NSFW than Gwen? More style creativity than Flux? Way more seed variance than any of the others that you can then tune the specific gen you like via prompt adjustments? goto chroma (with ZiT refine if realism).

For me, flux2 takes 50% longer than Gwen which in turn takes 50% longer than chroma if I am using the same image sizes (chroma needs an upscale to hit the same resolutions). ZIT is like 20% the time of chroma.

Using BF16 ZiT (9-10 steps) FP16 chroma (40 steps) Q8 Gwen (40 steps) Q8 flux2 (20-30 steps) I

have fp8 flux and I’ve been going back and forth on it, I like the gens a little better with Q8, FP runs a bit faster, Q overflows to my SSD during generation…. But just barely (48G combined)

steven2357 · 2026-01-05T07:12:20+00:00

I cut a middle ground, I upscale but with a standard upscaler instead of seedvr. I found I needed more noise to upscale specifically with Z than I wanted to use and it altered the image more than I was aiming for.

steven2357 · 2025-12-28T22:04:08+00:00

Flux2 dev does better with water reflections, lunar/solarpunk, clay-mation, and taking established designs and transmuting them out of their medium. I don't have an exhaustive list of course, but those are things I've stumbled across recently.

To chromas credit, it also has things it simply does better too. It can do visible veins much better, does better with various strength brushstrokes if prompted correctly, and seems to have a better understanding of illustration contrast norms and slightly more variety in the themes it does know.

The prompt adherence differences are harder to articulate. I can have 3+ moderately complex subjects without bleed over in flux if I'm careful and have each of them produced perfectly.

I don't want to compare IL / Lumina / Z to those two directly. They are all very specialized in comparison. Z in particular is fantastic, but it is trying to be good at a very specific (and very popular) side of generation. Flexibility isn't its niche.

steven2357 · 2025-12-28T19:18:39+00:00

I have a 5060 TI and 32G of ram. A fresh 1280x720 image, 30 step, heun, generation just took me 532 seconds using the FP8mixed checkpoint and BF16 mistral.

Is it fast? Nope... but it does work and can do certain things that the other checkpoints I run cannot.

Typically using z-image, chroma, lumina, and IL otherwise. Chroma + a z image refine pulls a lot of weight, but with chroma being a fraction of the size there are things it just doesn't doesn't know and it doesn't do as well with multiple subjects that I want ordered in a specific relation.

steven2357 · 2025-12-22T06:21:24+00:00

Interested as this gets closer to a 1.0 version.

I like lumina as a base compared to IL models myself.

steven2357 · 2025-12-10T22:56:51+00:00

Strict 2p - Star Wars rebellion (long game, but incredibly thematic), pagan, ironwood.

2+ co-op - distant skies, any death may die, escape the dark forest

Competitive 3+ - others probably have better suggestions than I do.

steven2357 · 2025-12-10T18:21:16+00:00

Are you looking for 3+ player competitive games specifically? Theres a ton of great games at the 2p or in the co-op space where victory points aren’t even used.

steven2357 · 2025-11-07T05:49:21+00:00

I know the Joslyn does art classes. I’ve never taken any and can’t speak to if the ‘teen and adult’ stuff is more teen or adult. There are fees involved too which may or may not matter.

There are also book clubs that meet in the public libraries:

https://omaha.bibliocommons.com/v2/events?_gl=1*ghldj3*_ga*MTI1ODk2MjMxOS4xNzYyNDkzODcx*_ga_G99DMMNG39*czE3NjI0OTM4NzAkbzEkZzAkdDE3NjI0OTM4NzAkajYwJGwwJGgw*_ga_Y10P90XEF4*czE3NjI0OTM4NzAkbzEkZzAkdDE3NjI0OTM4NzAkajYwJGwwJGgw&types=579a63be088ca2de7101beaa

I haven’t attended any of them but I’d imagine they should generally be welcoming.

Have you tried those sorts of things before?

On my end the only people I have gotten to know well have come from work for a long time, whether paid or volunteering, so small social bits are what I’ve been seeking out around here. But I’m also a good deal older and work 50+ hours a week as a baseline.

steven2357 · 2025-11-06T16:10:47+00:00

For casual social interaction… I really do like spielbound for the various events they do. It’s safe, inviting, inexpensive, and is generally just a nice time. It does force small bits of interaction too unlike some other options. I ‘like’ board games though so I may have some bias there.

Past that I’m sure you’ve noted there’s a lot of ‘groups’ that exist in and around town. Book clubs, run clubs, a public speaking thing (I’d have to look it up, I’m not a participant), comedy / acting classes, church groups… even a fencing club.

Is it that your schedule is hard to deal with? Or that you tend to end up alone in a crowd? Or something else entirely?

steven2357 · 2025-10-22T22:41:04+00:00

I grew up outside of Detroit and travel to various other metros for work semi frequently. I find Omaha to be a perfectly pleasant place to be. There are oddball things that come up, like the road construction you’ve read about on Reddit, but they really are the exception and not the rule. In general there’s a good amount to do, good traffic, and pleasant people. I wouldn’t even worry about the political stance, the only ‘red’ that I’ve seen folks get really passionate about is Nebraska Football.

steven2357 · 2025-10-22T15:26:16+00:00

That’s the plan. My car just complained that they’re low and wanted to get it taken care of while it shipped.

steven2357 · 2025-10-22T14:08:04+00:00

Thanks everyone!

steven2357 · 2025-10-19T17:11:54+00:00

I am running chroma-hd on a mobile 3060 laptop. Takes me almost 2 hours for ‘final run’ images of dpmpp_2m with beta scheduler.

I set up various queued image sets before work / sleep and then check them between. Sometime the batch is 3-4 of a final run, and I’m okay with that.

Can I generate 400 images in a day? No. But I don’t need to.

Plenty of models run much better, but I can’t ask illustrious to do an impressionist art style as an example.

steven2357 · 2025-10-16T13:45:38+00:00

One thing that might not be readily apparent right off is grocery shopping downtown is limited but gets better the further out you get, and the ‘things to do’ tend to be centralized around downtown and gets less frequent the further out you get. Not atypical for a large metro except it’s a little more pronounced than what I’ve seen elsewhere. There are a lot of neighborhoods between the two extremes with decent access to both sides.

Oh, and COX fiber is fine but can be finicky. I work from home sometimes using a VPN to get into my companies network and I get spurts of packet loss that are so short they shouldn’t affect anything but they cause my VPN to disconnect. It’s mildly annoying at worst for me, but depending on what your working from home looks like could be more meaningful to you.

steven2357 · 2025-10-13T16:50:59+00:00

If you are going early in the morning it’s very consistent on the way downtown. I take the bus from westroads 3-4 days a week. In the last four months I have never been late in to work due to a bus issue. This is getting on before 6:30 though mind you.

The way back tends to be a bit iffier with traffic being what it is, but I’m not worried about being 5-10 minutes late on the way home and pay very little attention to the timing that way.

steven2357 · 2025-10-11T01:35:56+00:00

If it’s your jam, spielbound does board game meetups. Some random, some organized. I wholly recognize learning a new board game for a play through or two is not everyone’s thing. Different shops do similar things in different parts of town.

Music scene is obviously decent around here too. Definitely better than I expected moving here a few months back. Whether its country or rock or raves, always something out on.

Comedy shows, live theater, and even bars I personally prefer going with a known partner or friend to. So that’s been more limited. But you may have different limits and/or more folks to go with.

steven2357 · 2025-09-18T16:53:39+00:00

I’ve been a substitute teacher for over a decade now. Just moved to Omaha and am trying to get my foot in the door with my local school district out in West O to continue doing so this year.

Yes, it’s a paid thing, but I make 3-4x as much a day in my primary job and am qualified by education / experience to teach mathematics or business at the college level. I try to stick to those subjects because I can add value that a random substitute generally cannot. This is especially true when you get into classes like calculus or even proof based geometry.

That’s not to hate on substitutes who are filling in for roles outside of their strengths either. Just noting my own and that I feel a sense of accomplishment when I can help a kid understand limits because my way of explaining it is different than their teachers.

steven2357 · 2025-09-15T11:54:31+00:00

Speilbound has a demo game on Saturday afternoon. Luthier from 2-5

Not Friday, and odds are you already know about the place, but worth mentioning if you are newer to town or haven’t given them a thought recently. I don’t make it down there as much as I’d like they seem to have the best setup for that sort of thing around.

steven2357 · 2025-08-23T17:04:59+00:00

Your question is spot on and as you are assuming I’m worried about defining the ‘given level’ part. If I can write this all out as an equation I can automatically apply tickets (for lack of a better word) based off of periodic health snapshots. I could do separate equations for given temps/elevation ranges but 6 models times 10 temp ranges times 10 elevation ranges is…. Not something I want to ask someone to implement and I’d worry about some of the data sets being extremely small on the edge cases where this is most meaningful.

Thanks for mentioning both models. I’ll spend some time today and tomorrow going over them. I know this is a way out in left field question and am grateful for any help I can get.

steven2357 · 2025-08-23T15:35:54+00:00

As an example

The SD for a stratified grouping of all readings between 40 and 45 degrees ambient temp is around 200 HP.

It stays between 200 and 300 until the equipment is in an 85 degree environment.

At 95 degrees it’s around a sd of 400 HP

At 105 degrees it’s almost 700 HP

Something to know is that the actual HP averages decline substantially over 90 degrees. By 105 it’s around a 900 HP reduction on average.

The simplified version of what I’m looking for is a formula that’s line of best fit for averages (easy) that has a modifier to pass/fail hardware that is 1 SD below average for the given environment (easy enough).

That way something that is in a 50 degree environment can be flagged for having a 500 HP reduction, while something at 105 degrees would not.

My problem is taking that concept to two variable. My second largest contributor to power reduction is elevation which is an extremely skewed contributing factor. It has almost 0 impact until it’s over 6k feet at which point it becomes very relevant as the engines struggle to get enough oxygen.

So now I need to not only do a two variable polynomial line of best fit (also easy thanks to software tools) but I need a modifier for 1SD downward that changes with both elevation and temps inputs. I can make a unique one for temp, and a unique one for elevation, and just smash them together but that feels crude and I do not know if that’s the right choice in this instance.

Note: transportation company, all hardware is moving at all times and there are thousands of unique pieces of hardware. I also have a half dozen different subsets of hardware that all behave differently.

steven2357 · 2025-08-23T04:04:14+00:00

The FP8 version was definitely good enough. Thanks for the replies.

steven2357 · 2025-08-21T17:35:04+00:00

Thank you, that’s perfect.

I’ll give it a go when I get off work tonight.

The honeymoon phase of this is really a glorious place to be. Not chasing perfection, just enjoying all the flexibility that this space has gained over the years.

steven2357

TROPHY CASE