Illustrious XL / Pony (SDXL anime) VRAM requirements

01The files, and how much VRAM each needs

“Needed” = file + 1.2 GB working memory + 0.8 GB system reserve. The 6.94 GB checkpoint holds the UNet plus text encoders and VAE; only the UNet (about 5.1 GB) sits in VRAM while sampling. The GGUF and FP8 files from calcuis contain the UNet only.

02By amount of VRAM

03Best GPU for Illustrious / Pony

The cheapest cards (by launch price) that run it well, and every card sorted by memory: best GPU for Illustrious / Pony → Planning bigger images or longer clips? Open the calculator →

04By graphics card

On RTX 40/50 GPUs the FP8 file is preferred over Q8_0 when both fit (hardware FP8). All verdicts are calculated; see how the numbers work.

05Text encoder, VAE and other files

The text encoder is inside the checkpoint, so there is nothing extra to download.

06Where the files go in ComfyUI

Standard ComfyUI folders. After copying files, press R in ComfyUI (or restart it) to refresh the lists. Some uploads need their uploader's own loader node — see the notes above.

07AMD, Intel and NVIDIA: which file types are fast

Every file type loads on every listed GPU, so the memory verdicts apply to all of them. What differs is speed: FP8 maths needs RTX 40/50 or RX 9000 (with ROCm 6.4+ and PyTorch 2.7+); ComfyUI's INT8 maths runs on NVIDIA and AMD, not on Intel; GGUF is unpacked on the fly on any GPU, which costs some speed. NVFP4 files are fast only on RTX 50. AMD runs ComfyUI on Windows through ROCm, Intel through PyTorch XPU; some custom nodes are NVIDIA-only. Source: ComfyUI model_management.py. AMD and Intel guide →

08Measured and reported results

Reported results are other people's numbers, copied as published, with a link. Settings, drivers and ComfyUI versions differ, so compare them with care. Send yours.

09Training a LoRA for Illustrious / Pony

No trainer documentation with a VRAM figure for this model was found yet. What the trainers say for other models →

10Every file tracked for Illustrious / Pony

SDXL architecture (UNet ~2.6B, 3.5B incl. text encoders) - fits exactly like SDXL. Illustrious XL and Pony V6 are the two main anime base families; most people run Civitai fine-tunes (WAI, NoobAI, etc.) that are the same 6.94 GB all-in-one size. HF downloads: Pony mirror ~289k, Illustrious v0.1 ~81k.