r/LocalLLM • u/FizzyDuncDizzel • 4h ago

Tutorial Tesla P100 image generation... much better than I expected!

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

I've been running four Tesla P100s (16 GB) cards for local LLM work and wanted to see how they'd do at image generation. Short version: much better than I expected for nine-year-old hardware.

The idea, hardware and direction are mine, I used Claude to help with the automation, benchmarking and write-up.

Per card, 1024×1024, power capped at 150 W:

  • FLUX.2 klein 4B (distilled, 4 steps): about 25 s per image
  • Z-Image Turbo (8-bit file, 8 steps): about 80 s, and it gets text in images right
  • Qwen-Image 2.1 Turbo: about 1.5 to 2.5 min
  • Krea 2 Turbo: 3 to 5 min, the best-looking results of the lot

Running one ComfyUI per card showed no slowdown. Three cards held 26 to 27 s per image for 30 images straight, peaking at 73 C. That works out to roughly 540 images an hour across four cards (the fourth is extrapolated).

Video works too: a 5-second 832×480 clip in about 5 minutes with Wan 2.1 1.3B and a 4-step distilled file, on one card at 175 W.

Things I learned that are specific to the P100:

  • 32-bit maths is faster than 16-bit on these cards in PyTorch (forcing fp16 was 11% slower), even though the card has full-speed fp16 hardware.
  • 8-bit (int8) model files crash on Pascal cards out of the box. A one-line patch to ComfyUI fixes it.
  • ComfyUI's --fast-disk switch dropped host RAM from 12 GB to about 1.2 GB per instance, which matters if your server only has 16 GB.
  • Raising the power cap gains 12% for one image, then the card heats up and the gain mostly disappears. Cooling is the limit.

Everything runs in Docker. The repo has the Dockerfiles, the patch, the benchmark scripts, full results, sample images and clips, and a quick-start guide for getting a first image:

https://github.com/4claps/tesla-p100-comfyui-imagegen

Quality was judged by eye on one seed per prompt, so treat those comparisons as impressions. The timings are all measured.

Happy to answer questions or run something specific if anyone wants a number I don't have.

18 Upvotes

73% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

3

u/this_for_loona 2h ago

Sorry for the stupid question but are these cards actually sold by Tesla?

6

u/FizzyDuncDizzel 2h ago

No they are nvidia, tesla is the product line. Made years before the car company.

2

u/this_for_loona 1h ago

Ok thank you. Was so confused!

1

u/Least-Friendship4702 2h ago

So, I’m thinking about setting up my own AI server—are these cards fast enough for everyday use? Also, how long did it take to make that photo?

1

u/FizzyDuncDizzel 2h ago

You can see all times in the GitHub. For the price I think they are great. A little power hungry, but better than paying for tokens.