It's hard to miss how much attention AI image generators alone have attracted in recent months. With good reason, because they demonstrate the progress of deep learning models in a vivid and playful way. From chaotic random images generated with neural networks, which Google made accessible to the general public with Deep Dream in 2015, the journey went to almost photo-realistic images of the generators Dall-E 2 by Open AI, Midjourney by Midjian, or DreamStudio by Stable Diffusion. Generators are now available not only in the cloud, but also for your own PC. Provided it has enough power.

Artificial Intelligence and deep learning are constantly in the headlines these days, whether it be ChatGPT generating poor advice, self-driving cars, artists being accused of using AI, medical advice from AI, and more. Most of these tools rely on complex servers with lots of hardware for training, but using the trained network via inference can be done on your PC, using its graphics card. But how fast are consumer GPUs for doing AI inference? We've benchmarked Stable Diffusion, a popular AI image creator, on the latest Nvidia, AMD, and even Intel GPUs to see how they stack up. If you've by chance tried to get Stable Diffusion up and running on your own PC, you may have some inkling of how complex -- or simple!