AMD Radeon 7900 XTX Offers Higher GenAI Performance Per Dollar In Stable Diffusion (Automatic111) Than NVIDIA RTX 4080 After 890% Speedup

wccftech.com:

NVIDIA is absolutely dominating the AI conversation right and for good measure - their GPUs perform out-of-the-box and are a top choice for professionals and businesses that want to dabble in consumer AI. But just this week, both Intel and AMD optimized their software stacks to get massive speedups in generative AI which has seen AMD's RTX 7900 XTX get higher performance per dollar than an NVIDIA RTX 4080 in generative AI (specifically Stable Diffusion with A111). Considering Stable Diffusion accounts for the vast majority of non-SaaS, localized generative AI right now - this is a major milestone and finally offers some competition to NVIDIA.

Using Microsoft Olive and DirectML instead of the PyTorch pathway results in the AMD 7900 XTX going form a measly 1.87 iterations per second to 18.59 iterations per second! You can read the detailed guide by AMD over here. This level of performance in Automatic111 is pretty close to the SHARK-based approach to Stable Diffusion and definitively puts the company on the map with regards to generative AI. As it turns out, it also makes the 7900 XTX offer slightly higher GenAI performance per dollar than the comparative RTX 4080 - at least at current prices.

The cheapest NVIDIA RTX 4080 I could find on Newegg (on 8/19/2023) was the MSI Ventus GeForce RTX 4080 16GB (WBM archived link here) and the cheapest AMD Radeon 7900 XTX I could find on Newegg was the MSI Gaming Radeon RX 7900 XTX 24GB (WBM archived link here). Before we crunch the numbers, I do want to mention the caveat that unlike NVIDIA, the AMD pathway does require the user to be a bit more tech savvy (AMD pathway uses Microsoft Olive instead of PyTorch and most automatic installers will likely not install the dependencies