Ran through an SDXL LoRA fine-tune and jotted down VRAM usage along the way, for anyone on the fence about upgrading their card.
Setup: 1024 resolution, FP16, xformers on. Batch size pinned at 1, usage came out just over 13GB; pushed batch to 8, it jumped straight to over 18GB. Nothing else changed in between, just the batch.
Going by these numbers, if you want to run SDXL LoRA training reliably, 16GB is the starting line — go lower and you’re making all kinds of compromises, hitting OOM constantly. If you’re on an old 12GB card, don’t force it — either drop the resolution, or just stick with batch 1 and grind through slowly.