Table of Contents
Quick Verdict
Generating 100,000 product images for an e-commerce catalogue is a batch job where cost per image decides project feasibility. SDXL delivers at £0.76 per 1,000 images versus Flux.1’s £2.56 — a 3.4x cost advantage. On a dedicated GPU server, SDXL is the only practical choice for high-volume batch image generation unless Flux.1’s quality premium justifies the 3x cost markup.
Flux.1 produces noticeably better prompt adherence and fine detail, which matters for hero images and marketing assets. For catalogue thumbnails and variants, SDXL’s quality is more than sufficient.
Data below. More at the GPU comparisons hub.
Specs Comparison
Flux.1’s 12B parameters versus SDXL’s 3.5B explains the quality gap but also the 3.4x VRAM difference that constrains batch sizes on shared hardware.
| Specification | SDXL | Flux.1 |
|---|---|---|
| Parameters | 3.5B (UNet) | 12B |
| Architecture | Latent Diffusion | Rectified Flow Transformer |
| Context Length | 1024×1024 | 1024×1024 |
| VRAM (FP16) | 7 GB | 24 GB |
| VRAM (INT4) | N/A | N/A |
| Licence | CreativeML Open RAIL++-M | Apache 2.0 (schnell) |
Guides: SDXL VRAM requirements and Flux.1 VRAM requirements.
Batch Processing Benchmark
Tested on an NVIDIA RTX 3090 at default resolutions with maximum batch utilisation. See our benchmark page.
| Model (INT4) | Batch tok/s | Cost/M Tokens | GPU Utilisation | VRAM Used |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SDXL | 2.1 img/min | $0.0019/img | 90% | 7 GB |
| Flux.1 | 3.5 img/min | $0.006/img | 92% | 24 GB |
Flux.1’s higher images-per-minute in batch mode is offset by its 3x higher per-image cost and full GPU saturation. SDXL’s 17 GB of free VRAM at batch sizes means you could theoretically run two SDXL instances on the same GPU. See our best GPU for LLM inference guide.
See also: SDXL vs Flux.1 for API Serving (Throughput) for a related comparison.
See also: SD 1.5 vs SDXL for Cost-Optimised Batch Processing for a related comparison.
Cost Analysis
At 100,000 images, SDXL costs approximately £76 versus Flux.1’s £256. That £180 saving per batch run adds up rapidly for teams generating images regularly.
| Cost Factor | SDXL | Flux.1 |
|---|---|---|
| GPU Required | RTX 3090 (24 GB) | RTX 3090 (24 GB) |
| VRAM Used | 7 GB | 24 GB |
| Images/min | 4.3 | 2.5 |
| Cost/1K Images | £0.76 | £2.56 |
See our cost calculator.
Recommendation
Choose SDXL for bulk image generation where volume economics determine project viability. Catalogue imagery, social media templates, design variations, and dataset augmentation all benefit from SDXL’s 3.4x cost advantage.
Choose Flux.1 for premium batch jobs where each generated image will be customer-facing and quality directly affects brand perception. Marketing campaigns, hero banners, and portfolio showcases warrant the premium.
Run batch image generation overnight on dedicated GPU servers for peak efficiency.
Deploy the Winner
Run SDXL or Flux.1 on bare-metal GPU servers with full root access, no shared resources, and no token limits.
Browse GPU Servers
