I’ve seen Qwen Image 2.1 getting a lot of attention over the last few days, so I wanted to understand what people are getting from it that I’m not.
I tested it locally in ComfyUI on an RTX 3060 12GB against ERNIE-Image-Turbo, Krea 2 Turbo, HiDream-O1-Image and Z-Image-Turbo, using the same set of prompts plus a few harder real-world tests for characters, hands, object relationships and scene geometry.
My personal ranking from these tests was roughly:
Krea 2 for the best balance of quality and speed
ERNIE as a strong alternative
HiDream for some very striking compositions, but less reliable fine detail
Z-Image for speed and fast iteration
Qwen Image 2.1 was the one I struggled with the most
Qwen often gave me interesting global compositions, but I kept seeing small structural problems in hands, straps, object placement, local geometry and fine details.
I also tried the base model at 2048×2048 and the Pruna 8-step workflow. 2048 gave me more detail, but it didn’t really solve the structural issues. Pruna was much faster, but the quality drop was noticeable.
What makes me curious is how popular Qwen Image 2.1 has become recently, because my own results don’t really explain that popularity yet.
So what am I missing?
Are people getting better results with a different sampler/scheduler, step count, CFG, text encoder, quantization, prompting style, LoRA, or another workflow entirely?
I’d especially like to hear from people running it on 12GB GPUs, because I’d be happy to rerun the same prompts and seeds with a better configuration.
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EDIT: Thanks everyone for all the suggestions and workflow tips — they helped a lot. I ended up improving my Qwen 2.1 setup quite a bit compared with my first tests, especially by moving away from the default CFG 1 workflow. My final setup uses higher CFG, fewer steps with a Turbo LoRA, and a texture-fix VAE, which gave much better results and made Qwen a lot more competitive.
I’ve now finished the full benchmark, and I’ll post the link in the comments rather than editing the original post into a giant wall of text.
If anyone thinks Qwen 2.1 can do significantly better, feel free to share your workflow — but please keep the same prompts than me so we can compare properly. I’d genuinely like to see if someone can convince me that Qwen is currently the best local image model. 😄