Trying Out Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large Turbo
Let’s be real—when Stability AI dropped Stable Diffusion 3.5, I wasn’t expecting much. But after testing the Large Turbo version, I was surprised by how much cleaner the outputs looked compared to older models.
The typography actually works now, which is something I’ve struggled with in past versions. Complex prompts that used to confuse SDXL render more accurately here. And the best part? It does this while needing fewer inference steps than before.
How I Got It Running
I just grabbed the model from Hugging Face—you’ll need to log in and agree to share contact info first. After downloading, I dropped stable-diffusion-3.5-large-turbo.safetensors into my models/checkpoints folder.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.03206
If you’ve used other SD models before, you might already have the text encoders (clip_g, clip_l, and t5xxl_fp16) in your models/clip folder. If not, you’ll need those too.
https://stability.ai/community-license-agreement
Licensing Stuff
Here’s the thing—Stability’s Community License is pretty flexible. For personal projects or research, you’re good to go. Even small businesses under $1M revenue can use it freely. Bigger companies need to reach out for an Enterprise License, which makes sense.
https://comfyuiblog.com/comfyui-stable-diffusion-3-5-advanced-workflow-refine
Pushing It Further
I found this advanced workflow that refines outputs even more—check it out if you want to tweak details. The model’s MMDiT architecture seems to handle QK-normalization better than older versions, but I still ran into some artifacts at lower steps.
https://huggingface.co/stabilityai/stable-diffusion-3.5-large
Anyway, if you’re curious, the full model card and download links are on Hugging Face. Just don’t expect miracles—it’s still got that classic SD quirkiness, just with fewer steps and better text rendering.
https://huggingface.co/stabilityai/stable-diffusion-3-medium
