Picking an SD3 versionStability AI have packaged up SD3 M... | Picking an SD3 versionStability AI have packaged up SD3 M...
Picking an SD3 version
Stability AI have packaged up SD3 Medium in different ways to make sure it can run on as many devices as possible.

SD3 uses three different text encoders. (The text encoder is the part that takes your prompt and puts it into a format the model can understand). One of these new text encoders is really big – meaning it uses a lot of memory. If you’re looking at the SD3 Hugging Face weights, you’ll see four options with different text encoder configurations. You should choose which one to use based on your available VRAM.

sd3_medium_incl_clips_t5xxlfp8.safetensors
This encoder contains the model weights, the two CLIP text encoders and the large T5-XXL model in a compressed fp8 format. We recommend these weights for simplicity and best results.

sd3_medium_incl_clips_t5xxlfp16.safetensors
The same as sd3_medium_incl_clips_t5xxlfp8.safetensors, except the T5 part isn’t compressed as much. By using fp16 instead of fp8, you’ll get a slight improvement in your image quality. This improvement comes at the cost of higher memory usage.

sd3_medium_incl_clips.safetensors
This version does away with the T5 element altogether. It includes the weights with just the two CLIP text encoders. This is a good option if you do not have much VRAM, but your results might be very different from the full version. You might notice that this version doesn’t follow your prompts as closely, and it may also reduce the quality of text in images.

sd3_medium.safetensors
This model is just the base weights without any text encoders. If you use these weights, make sure you’re loading the text encoders separately. Stability AI have provided an example ComfyUI workflow for this.