Stability AI has been working on new SD XL for long time and beta version was released earlier this year and now they have made SD XL 0.9 available to the users on Clipdrop and Nightcafe and the results are amazing.
Before the model is available to download Joe Penna from Stability AI staff has issued a warning that the model will only be released in safetensors format and users shouldn’t download .ckpt files of SDXL 0.9 as .ckpt file might contain malicious code that may harm your computer
Where to access Stable diffusion XL 0.9?
You can access new model on clipdrop and nightcafe. Both the websites produces good results but Clipdrop produces better result in my honest opinion. Here are some examples
As you can see from above results that clipdrop produces slightly higher images. Only drawback with free version of clipdrop is that it places watermark on images otherwise they are brilliant.
One image on Nightcafe costs around 3 credits while on Clipdrop its free with a watermark on it. Stable Diffusion XL model has taken leaps from the SD 2.x models. They were heavily criticised and I think this model has the capability to give competition to midjourney as well.
At the moment its not clear how much ram would SD XL 0.9 require to load on Automatic1111 but 16GB would be the norm as this model is pretty heavy. Will have to wait till july to know the answers.
Early access for the SD XL 0.9 model
You can get early access for the new model on hugging face by clicking here. You would be asked few columns to fill to enter the waitlist for the earlier access of the new stable diffusion model.
However, keep in mind that it is totally up to Stability AI team whether to give you access or not. Happy creating.