Model reference · open weights

stable-diffusion-2-1

Image LanguageMachines Text→image 1 build Open weights 871 dl/mo

stable-diffusion-2-1 is an open-weight image model from LanguageMachines. stable-diffusion-2-1-base (FP32) weighs 2.6 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

For self-hosting, compare this build's requirements below with the GPU you plan to rent.

  • stable-diffusion-2-1 is a text-to-image generation model developed by LanguageMachines.
  • It is a latent diffusion model that uses an OpenCLIP-ViT/H text encoder to generate images from English prompts.
  • The model has 866M parameters and is released under the openrail++ license.

Summary of the LanguageMachines/stable-diffusion-2-1-base model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released byLanguageMachines
Released2023-06-28
Parameters866M
VRAM2.6 GB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for stable-diffusion-2-1-base (FP32)

2.6 GBweights, file size
1.7 GBbiggest part
5.0 GBworking memory, one 1024² image
537 MBruntime overhead
CardOne imageMemory
RTX 3060 12 GBfits11.6 GB
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GBfits15.4 GB
RTX 3090 24 GBfits23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GBfits23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GBfits31.0 GB
L40S 48 GBfits44.0 GB
A100 80 GBfits78.2 GB
H100 80 GBfits78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GBfits93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unifiedfits107 GB
H200 141 GBfits138 GB
B200 180 GBfits176 GB

From the model card

What LanguageMachines says about stable-diffusion-2-1

Read the model card

This model card focuses on the model associated with the Stable Diffusion v2-1-base model.

This stable-diffusion-2-1-base model fine-tunes stable-diffusion-2-base (512-base-ema.ckpt) with 220k extra steps taken, with punsafe=0.98 on the same dataset.

Model Details

  • Developed by: Robin Rombach, Patrick Esser

  • Model type: Diffusion-based text-to-image generation model

  • Language(s): English

  • License: CreativeML Open RAIL++-M License

  • Model Description: This is a model that can be used to generate and modify images based on text prompts. It is a Latent Diffusion Model that uses a fixed, pretrained text encoder (OpenCLIP-ViT/H).

  • Resources for more information: GitHub Repository.

  • Cite as:

    @InProceedings{Rombach_2022_CVPR,
        author    = {Rombach, Robin and Blattmann, Andreas and Lorenz, Dominik and Esser, Patrick and Ommer, Bj\"orn},
        title     = {High-Resolution Image Synthesis With Latent Diffusion Models},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
        month     = {June},
        year      = {2022},
        pages     = {10684-10695}
    }
    

Examples

Using the 🤗's Diffusers library to run Stable Diffusion 2 in a simple and efficient manner.

pip install diffusers transformers accelerate scipy safetensors

Running the pipeline (if you don't swap the scheduler it will run with the default PNDM/PLMS scheduler, in this example we are swapping it to EulerDiscreteScheduler):

from diffusers import StableDiffusionPipeline, EulerDiscreteScheduler
import torch

model_id = "stabilityai/stable-diffusion-2-1-base"

scheduler = EulerDiscreteScheduler.from_pretrained(model_id, subfolder="scheduler")
pipe = StableDiffusionPipeline.from_pretrained(model_id, scheduler=scheduler, torch_dtype=torch.float16)
pipe = pipe.to("cuda")

prompt = "a photo of an astronaut riding a horse on mars"
image = pipe(prompt).images[0]

image.save("astronaut_rides_horse.png")

Notes:

  • Despite not being a dependency, we highly recommend you to install xformers for memory efficient attention (better performance)
  • If you have low GPU RAM available, make sure to add a pipe.enable_attention_slicing() after sending it to cuda for less VRAM usage (to the cost of speed)

Uses

Direct Use

The model is intended for research purposes only. Possible research areas and tasks include

  • Safe deployment of models which have the potential to generate harmful content.
  • Probing and understanding the limitations and biases of generative models.
  • Generation of artworks and use in design and other artistic processes.
  • Applications in educational or creative tools.
  • Research on generative models.

Excluded uses are described below.

Misuse, Malicious Use, and Out-of-Scope Use

Note: This section is originally taken from the DALLE-MINI model card, was used for Stable Diffusion v1, but applies in the same way to Stable Diffusion v2.

The model should not be used to intentionally create or disseminate images that create hostile or alienating environments for people. This includes generating images that people would foreseeably find disturbing, distressing, or offensive; or content that propagates historical or current stereotypes.

Out-of-Scope Use

The model was not trained to be factual or true representations of people or events, and therefore using the model to generate such content is out-of-scope for the abilities of this model.

Misuse and Malicious Use

Using the model to generate content that is cruel to individuals is a misuse of this model. This includes, but is not limited to:

  • Generating demeaning, dehumanizing, or otherwise harmful representations of people or their environments, cultures, religions, etc.
  • Intentionally promoting or propagating discriminatory content or harmful stereotypes.
  • Impersonating individuals without their consent.
  • Sexual content without consent of the people who might see it.
  • Mis- and disinformation
  • Representations of egregious violence and gore
  • Sharing of copyrighted or licensed material in violation of its terms of use.
  • Sharing content that is an alteration of copyrighted or licensed material in violation of its terms of use.

Limitations and Bias

Limitations

  • The model does not achieve perfect photorealism
  • The model cannot render legible text
  • The model does not perform well on more difficult tasks which involve compositionality, such as rendering an image corresponding to “A red cube on top of a blue sphere”
  • Faces and people in general may not be generated properly.
  • The model was trained mainly with English captions and will not work as well in other languages.
  • The autoencoding part of the model is lossy
  • The model was trained on a subset of the large-scale dataset LAION-5B, which contains adult, violent and sexual content. To partially mitigate this, we have filtered the dataset using LAION's NFSW detector (see Training section).

Bias

While the capabilities of image generation models are impressive, they can also reinforce or exacerbate social biases. Stable Diffusion vw was primarily trained on subsets of [LAION-2B(en)](https://laion.ai/blog/lai

Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.

Running it yourself

Run it on a rented GPU

Rent a machine by the hour. ComfyUI is installed on it. Open ComfyUI through the tunnel: its default workflow loads a checkpoint. Choose this model's file in Load Checkpoint, with the settings its model card gives.

# on your rented machine: pip install diffusers transformers accelerate
import torch
from diffusers import DiffusionPipeline

pipe = DiffusionPipeline.from_pretrained("LanguageMachines/stable-diffusion-2-1-base", torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16).to("cuda")
image = pipe(prompt="a red bicycle on a cobbled street").images[0]
image.save("/workspace/out.png")
Renting a GPU: connect, tunnels, Python
# on your rented machine (the ssh line is on its page in the console)
# get REPO FILE FOLDER: one file into /workspace/models/FOLDER, where ComfyUI loads it from
get() { hf download "$1" "$2" --local-dir /workspace/hf-files && mkdir -p "/workspace/models/$3" && mv "/workspace/hf-files/$2" "/workspace/models/$3/$4"; }

# the model (4.9 GB)
get LanguageMachines/stable-diffusion-2-1-base v2-1_512-nonema-pruned.safetensors checkpoints

start-comfyui
Renting a GPU: connect, tunnels, ComfyUI
# on your computer, in a second terminal: ComfyUI in your browser at http://localhost:8188
# HOST, PORT and BOOKING are your machine's, from its page in the console
ssh -o HostKeyAlias=axforge-BOOKING -o StrictHostKeyChecking=accept-new -L 8188:localhost:8188 dev@HOST -p PORT
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