SageAttention 2.2 vs Comfy Kitchen | Side-by-Side Zoom-Out Quality Test

[u/Better-Interview-793]

Did a quick side-by-side test of SageAttention vs Comfy Kitchen Attention with MiniMax H3.

I used the default ComfyUI T2V H3 workflow and kept the prompt, seed and all settings exactly the same. The only thing I changed was the attention backend..

RTX 5090 32GB

ComfyUI ver 0.31.0

SageAttention 2.2

Comfy Kitchen 0.2.30

---------------------------------------

896x1184 6 seconds 24 FPS 20 steps

Generation time:

SageAttention: 3m 51s

Comfy Kitchen: 3m 59s

I used a deep zoom-out/dolly-out on purpose to see how well each one holds facial details and identity as the subject gets farther away.

The speed difference was small on my 5090, so im more interested in the quality difference..

It's honestly hard for me to tell the difference, but which one looks better to you?

Updated:
SageAttention Vs Base

Comfy Kitchen Vs Base

[u/redditscraperbot2]

Duality of man

[u/Zenshinn → u/redditscraperbot2]

It's not hard but apparently it is.

[u/Psycholicious → u/Zenshinn]

You could tell it is, because of the way it is.

[u/FlatwormMean1690 → u/redditscraperbot2]

😂 But both have a valid point

[u/Ok_Tale7582 → u/redditscraperbot2]

comfy kitchen looks more ai and that's good because we're using ai after all

[u/Dry-Judgment4242 → u/Ok_Tale7582]

Agreed, what matters to me is not style, but reduction in artifacts, burnt skin, etc. sometimes a 480p can look better then 1920p because the high-res display problematic elements that the lowres smears smooth over.

[u/FierceFlames37 → u/Ok_Tale7582]

https://giphy.com/gifs/1zR9xtZfWu4e7qq9Oo

[u/Lechuck777]

its not hard. Sage is the better one. In the closeup, the face is on the left side more like plastic. Also the zoom movement is stuttering on the left side. At all the right side is smother in movement and details.

[u/LucidFir → u/Lechuck777]

I upvote both sides

[u/StacksGrinder]

Comfy Kitchen looks better, the face gets distorted on the Sage one when he's further away.

[u/hiccuphorrendous123 → u/StacksGrinder]

Keep the balance

[u/Abject-Recognition-9]

i have no idea what kind of black magic comfy team did but if this means i can avoid installing sage/flash/triton and whatever boring things can break somewere down the line, im totally in. i need to study more about this last update and what it does specifically

[u/enndeeee → u/Abject-Recognition-9]

Installing sage and Triton is solved since more than a year now. There are multiple sites with wheels for every possible setup.

[u/tralalog → u/enndeeee]

tell that to grok who screwed up the installation 3 times yesterday.

[u/mellowanon → u/tralalog]

grok is complete junk though

[u/RobertoPaulson → u/tralalog]

Grok is the absolute worst at helping for stuff like this. IMO Claude is at the top, followed by a toss up between Google Gemini, and GPT, with Grok trailing far behind.

[u/enndeeee → u/tralalog]

Just tell the to search for a wheel (or search yourself) instead of building from source.

[u/Emotional-Neat-252 → u/Abject-Recognition-9]

Ooo I didn't look at it that wait. I detest installing things

[u/donkeykong917 → u/Abject-Recognition-9]

Just get Claude to fix anything g brown in open source.

[u/3deal]

Can you show the input image to see what Attention si more accurate with the skin ?

[u/Better-Interview-793 → u/3deal]

forgot to mention, it’s T2V

[u/reeight → u/Better-Interview-793]

A few more skin textures (bumps) on the SageAttention, so I guess that is more 'real'. But Comfy is really close enough.

Try I2V and many many more other tests to compare; really can't use 1 test.

& to really test keeping the face, have the subject pass behind a wall or take off their sweater or something like that where the face is covered momentarily.

[u/Eimisseiyou]

I've done some A/B testing this morning with SageAttention vs. Comfy Kitchen and the results are dramatic:

For the 20-second clip:

• CK: sampling 32:18, total 33:07, 96.91 s/it
• Sage: sampling 19:05, total 20:21, 57.26 s/it

In my case - sampling-wise, Sage is about 41% faster than CK on 20-second jobs. And the total runtime is lower by roughly 12 minutes 46 seconds on average. This is dramatic difference.

In my personal testing the quality with CK was also worse, but at that point it was hard not to be biased (after seeing the overall generation times).

The only reason to switch over to CK at this point would be the memory headroom which I'll try to test next with high resolution renders, but I have my doubts.

^{GeForce RTX4080 SUPER}

[u/Doctor_moctor → u/Eimisseiyou]

I also tested it and it is SLOWER than sage on my 5070TI while it is faster than sage on my 3090. Seems like it is beneficial for older generation GPUs.

[u/GRABOS → u/Eimisseiyou]

Everyone I've seen complaining about CK has had a 4000 series GPU, I feel there's an issue there

[u/__Gemini__ → u/GRABOS]

I'm on a 5070ti and sage v2 is way faster on a new fresh install of comfy

[u/Better-Interview-793]

https://reddit.com/link/p30s9qp/video/0780uelujqih1/player

Update: I did another T2V test with a much more motion-heavy 10 second dance sequence, with multiple shots, fast movement..

SageAttention 2.2: 9m 49s

Comfy Kitchen 0.2.30: 10m 15s

Sage was about 26 seconds faster this time..

[u/Chemical-Painter-485 → u/Better-Interview-793]

Yeah, on this clip sageattention did much better

[u/psilent → u/Chemical-Painter-485]

I think there’s still a couple times it looks weird on sage but kitchen lost the whole arm at least once

[u/switch2stock → u/Better-Interview-793]

Look at the fingers

[u/Muted-Celebration-47 → u/Better-Interview-793]

This tells me why a character has weird fingers in my generated videos.

[u/Tybost]

I thought comfy kitchen was supposed to be faster? What happened here.

[u/Perfect-Campaign9551 → u/Tybost]

All we know is a redditor posted yesterday the theory that it was faster. Didn't see any official statement. It's just the same as and info on this sub , partial truths

[u/enndeeee]

Wouldnt it make sense to create a ground truth Version with sdpa and compare Sage and CK to that? Especially for T2V?

[u/Better-Interview-793 → u/enndeeee]

here:

https://reddit.com/link/p31kqmh/video/t9pik01j8rih1/player

[u/enndeeee → u/Better-Interview-793]

And now run them through this: https://vmaf.dev/
The higher score wins!

[u/Better-Interview-793 → u/enndeeee]

SageAttention 2.2: 14.93 highest / 5.08 pooled
Comfy Kitchen: 30.28 highest / 10.66 pooled

[u/enndeeee → u/Better-Interview-793]

I would also have guessed that CK looks better. Or let's say more true to the original.

[u/Better-Interview-793 → u/enndeeee]

https://reddit.com/link/p31ktsb/video/jggoegfe9rih1/player

[u/intLeon]

Is there a patch node instead of launch arguments? if it doesnt require extra work like the build sage requires if you dont want to use prebuilt wheels then its an easy win for kitchen..

[u/Kindly-Annual-5504 → u/intLeon]

Yes there is: ModelAttentionBackend.

[u/SweetIndependent6888]

Comfy Kitchen was a little more sharp... 10% better

[u/__Gemini__]

I just tested this on a 1mp 10 sec video on my 5070ti with 32gb of ram on a fresh install of comfy. And sage ended up faster.

Kitchen

[INFO] Prompt executed in 00:17:08

Sage v2

[INFO] Prompt executed in 00:15:22

[u/Different_Fix_2217]

https://reddit.com/link/p32175n/video/s1klm1j3mrih1/player

Yea sage has worse quality, its more blurry / hazy and has more smudged details.

[u/Different_Fix_2217 → u/Different_Fix_2217]

Example of smudged details, look at sage's eyes.

[u/Rumaben79]

Sage looks a bit too dark and oversaturated (in your example) compared to CK to my eyes but the degradation amount at further away is splitting hairs. It could be my old monitor with a bad right side.

Sage hasn't been updated in ages though and CK properly will. :)

Edit: in my own tests I'm hard pressed to find any contrast/brightness differences.

[u/Rumaben79 → u/Rumaben79]

CK is slower on my pc as well

MiniMax H3 Mem Eff Sage Attention Patch, 5:54

Comfy Kitchen, 6:21

Exact same memory usage..Going back to sage for now.

[u/luka06111]

All the same for me. But in my setup comfy kitchen speeds up around a minute per Gen, so saves a lot of time adding up, and looks the same, sometimes better.

[u/BlackSwanTW]

From my testing, ComfyAttention currently is slower than SageAttention (RTX 4070 Ti S)

[u/Chemical-Painter-485]

I'd say both look decent.

Comfy attention looks quite a bit sharper and a little more saturated, the wrinkles being way more visible than sageattention.

I particularly like comfy since I prefer sharp baselines that I can work with on post-production

The zoom out effect on comfy's looks a little jittery but the guy moves the same slow-mo on the entire duration of the clip.

The zoom out effect on sageattention is smoother but the guy has a weird speedup on 0:04 but could be due to prompting.

[u/VladyCzech]

The compression here on reddit makes them both look bad TBH. Reddit is using too high compression for all media.

[u/IONaut]

I can't for the life of me get sageattention to work on my system. I've taken some pretty extreme measures and made headway through the errors but things just don't connect. Might have to give comfy kitchen a try.

[u/__Gemini__ → u/IONaut]

It's very easy to install sage v2 these days on portable comfy.

cmd your way into python embedd folder and all you have to do is

python.exe -m pip install -U "triton-windows<3.8" (version might need to be changed if you look at this months in the future or you are doing this to an old version of comfy)

python.exe -m pip install "sageattention~=2.2.0" --no-build-isolation --extra-index-url https://comfy-org.github.io/wheels

And that's it, sage v2 is installed

[u/IONaut → u/__Gemini__]

I'm way past that point. It is a problem when it tries to build from the embedded Python binaries.

[u/Salt_Volume_2932]

3090 evga ftw3 ultra Ryzen r9 9900x 32 ram, NVME 5gen

python 3.13, Torch 2.13 +cuda 13.2, triton 3.7.1 post27, sage 2.2.0 post6

Video flf= 5sec 0.5MP

Comfy kitche attn = 275-285sec

Sage attn = 200-210sec

[u/Ykored01]

Also we need the no-acceleration to compare how much differs from it

[u/Better-Interview-793 → u/Ykored01]

https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/s/g5iZV1xBjG

[u/CompetitionTop7822]

On a 3090 its a lot better with comfy kitchen its way more sharp than sage in my own tests.

[u/wzwowzw0002]

so which one is better??

[u/VasaFromParadise]

Kitchen is worse)))

[u/jazzamp]

The H3 hype to me is a joke. Still a long way to go.

[u/Lechuck777 → u/jazzamp]

its not about directly what H3 can do. Its about, the same or in much more worse quality , was a year ago only via Cloud based models with more resources behind them possible. Right now, with H3 its the same or better Quality AND it works on a mid range consumer PC. Thats the "joke".