Half the posts on this forum comparing Flux to SDXL jump straight into image quality, but I think that’s putting the cart before the horse. When you’re generating locally, the first real hurdle is whether your VRAM can even fit the model. No matter how high the benchmark scores are, it’s useless if it won’t load on your card.
My rule of thumb is pretty simple: with an 8G card, just stick to SDXL. The LoRA ecosystem is the biggest, tools are the most complete, and everything’s easy to find. For 10 to 16G, you can go with SD 3.5 Medium—text rendering is noticeably better, and the commercial license works too. If you’ve actually got 24G, then Flux.1 Dev’s image quality is the gold standard, but it’s non-commercial only, so you need to think that through first.
Don’t get fooled by those quantization tricks to save VRAM. If you force it in, you’ll lose most of the quality advantage anyway. If your hardware can’t reach that level of quality, it’s not your quality to begin with.