Can the RX 9070 XT 16 GB run SDXL 1.0?
Yes. 16-bit fits on the RX 9070 XT 16 GB with 8.9 GB to spare.
16-bit (6.9 GB) needs about 7.1 GB in use, so 8.9 GB of the 16 GB stays free: room for a larger image, a LoRA or a ControlNet.
01What to download
| Part | File | Folder | Size | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Checkpoint | sd_xl_base_1.0.safetensors 16-bit · stabilityai/stable-diffusion-xl-base-1.0 | models/checkpoints | 6.9 GB | Download → |
| Total download · keep about the same free on disk | 6.9 GB | |||
One file: the checkpoint already contains the text encoders and the VAE. Sizes from Hugging Face, 2026-10-01.
02Every SDXL file on 16 GB
| File | Size | Needed | On this card | Quality | Download |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 16-bit ← SAFETENSORS · stabilityai | 6.9 GB | 7.1 GB | fits · 8.9 GB spare | the original weights | Hugging Face → |
“Needed” adds 1.2 GB of working memory for SDXL and a 0.8 GB reserve. Sizes 2026-10-01. The 6.94 GB checkpoint also holds the two text encoders and the VAE. During sampling only the UNet (about 5.1 GB at 16-bit, 2.6B parameters) has to sit in VRAM, so that is the figure used for the 16-bit file.
03The text encoder
The text encoder is inside the checkpoint, so there is nothing extra to download.
04Measured and reported results
| Label | Setup | Result | Peak VRAM | Date | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| reported | SDXL · 1024x1024 · 20 steps “| SDXL | 20 | 1024x1024 | 1.5it/s | 27.76s | Manual tiled VAE decoder |” Ubuntu 24.04, ROCm 6.4.1, PyTorch nightly, TUNABLEOP + AOTriton experimental, --use-pytorch-cross-attention; without tiled VAE 1.49 it/s / 34.56 s; default VAE decode could OOM | 27.76 s / image · 1.5 it/s | — | 2025-05-30 | github.com → |
Other people's numbers are copied as published, with a link. Send yours.
05About the RX 9070 XT 16 GB
ComfyUI supports AMD GPUs on Windows officially since v0.7.0 (January 2026), through ROCm. Memory works the same as on NVIDIA, so the fit verdicts apply. Some custom nodes are NVIDIA-only. RX 9000 (RDNA 4) GPUs have FP8 hardware, and ComfyUI computes FP8 natively on them with PyTorch 2.7+ and ROCm 6.4+.
16 GB GDDR6 · 256-bit · 640 GB/s · RDNA 4. Everything that runs on it →
06Questions
How much VRAM does SDXL need?
Around 7.1 GB with the smallest file (16-bit).
Which SDXL file should I download for the RX 9070 XT 16 GB?
16-bit (6.9 GB) from stabilityai/stable-diffusion-xl-base-1.0.
How much do I need to download for SDXL on the RX 9070 XT 16 GB?
6.9 GB: sd_xl_base_1.0.safetensors.