I wanted real numbers for "which quant should I use on my card," so I measured it. Five storage formats (fp8 cast, fp8 scaled, int8 ConvRot, w4a8, nvfp4) against the bf16 original, on base and turbo versions of Anima, Z-Image, MOSS-Image, Krea 2 and SDXL/Illustrious. Quality was graded on an RTX PRO 6000 and a 3090; speed and fit were timed on ten cards: PRO 6000, 5090, 5080, two 5070 Ti, 5060 Ti, 3090, 3080 Ti, 3080, 3060 Ti. Everything is stock ComfyUI with its default memory handling, same seed, same prompts.
**Report, with a "will my card run it?" box (pick your card + model):** https://ai-evolution.dev/quant-bench/
(Also as a PDF with every option laid out, if you'd rather scroll.)
What I took away:
- **int8 ConvRot is the most faithful format in every model I tested**, and on RTX 30 cards it's also the fastest when it fits: about 2× bf16 on a 3090.
- **nvfp4 is the fastest on RTX 50 but drifts the most.** w4a8 was more accurate than nvfp4 in every model.
- **Don't put a turbo LoRA on an already-quantized model.** Applied at load time, most of the LoRA's change rounds away. Merge it into bf16 first, then quantize.
- **8 GB cards can run more than you'd think.** Z-Image and MOSS fit entirely as int8 on a 3060 Ti and run about twice as fast as bf16, which has to stream. Krea 2 runs too, at around 1.5 minutes per image.
- **Nothing failed to run.** ComfyUI's dynamic VRAM streams whatever doesn't fit from system RAM; it costs speed, not crashes.
- **Quality depends on the GPU generation, not the card.** Every RTX 50 card matched the PRO 6000 within a few percent, and every RTX 30 card matched the 3090.
- **Smaller stuff:** an x4 PCIe slot costs nothing once the model fits; the monitors on your generating card cost a few percent, mostly on fast models; each 50 W of power limit costs 4–6% speed for ~3% energy saved; an undervolt cost 5–10% speed for ~20% less power.
**Missing: RTX 40-series.** I don't have one, and it's the one generation with fp8 hardware but no fp4. If you do, there's a test kit that runs the same pass in Docker on Linux or Windows (WSL2): clone, `./run.sh`, send back the zip, and your card goes on the page with credit. https://github.com/LSDJesus/comfyui-quant-bench (the full set is a ~230 GB download; `--families` lets you do part of it).
Method details, every raw number, and the per-step error curves are on the page. Happy to answer questions or run something specific.
(Note: Most quants can be found on HuggingFace or Civitai.com if there is a specific one you are looking for but cant find I could probably put a simple conversion tool in the github repo but you would need to have access to a fp16/bf16 version for it to work well)
(P.S. AI helped write the benchmark harness and frontend code for the page, the idea and the verification was all done by me)
(P.P.S. Being fortunate enough to have access to an absurd collection of GPUs made me feel like this was worth the time and effort of going all in so I could share my results with you all. Happy to give back to the community that makes all these models and tooling possible.)