50-step SDXL quality in just 4 steps via adversarial diffusion distillation. Fully Apache 2.0 commercial. ComfyUI-native workflow. The fastest path from creative brief to production asset on 8GB VRAM hardware.
This model requires a specialized High-VRAM environment. Ensure you have the latest CUDA Drivers or Metal Framework installed.
Minimum VRAM: 10GB VRAM Recommended
The SDXL-Lightning model by ByteDance is a 3.5B diffusion parameter architecture optimized for image tasks. It requires approximately 8GB of VRAM to comfortably run locally using a FP16 quantization. Extending the context window up to 0 tokens will dynamically allocate further VRAM, meaning high-bandwidth memory hardware is strictly advised.
For running SDXL-Lightning at maximum tokens-per-second, we recommend using LM Studio or Ollama with a GGUF quantization (Q4_K_M or Q6_K). If you are multi-GPU, use vLLM to distribute the layers across your VRAM pool for optimal throughput.
You will need a GPU with at least 10GB of VRAM to run the FP16 quantized version smoothly with a moderate context window.
The simplest method is utilizing Ollama by executing 'ollama run sdxl-lightning' directly in your command line. Alternatively, you can search for the model via LM Studio's interface.