Just ran the full-step version of RealVisXL v5.0 locally, and the difference from the Turbo/Lightning I’ve been playing with is pretty obvious. Here are some notes.
This is the full-step variant—it prioritizes quality over speed, so don’t try to crank the steps down like you would with Turbo. Skin texture and edge sharpness come from those extra steps.
Hardware-wise, it’s way more demanding than anime models. I’m running it on a 16G machine, and it’s barely passable. If you want a smooth experience, you’ll need at least 24 to 32G, since realistic models have a much larger working set. For quantization, I’d say go with the high-precision option if you have enough VRAM—realism is all about details, and there’s less room for error compared to stylized models.
As for prompts, it eats up natural language plus photography terms—lens, lighting, film look—all that stuff. Make sure your negative prompt is detailed, and weed out anything that screams fake. Stick close to 1024 resolution; go much higher and faces and hands will mess up. Running real human faces locally gives me peace of mind—no worries about uploading them somewhere for training.
