A lot of other creators I know are thinking about switching to InvokeAI—the UI is way cleaner than ComfyUI’s mess of wires, and it gets updated more often than Automatic1111. But no matter how clean the interface is, the underlying models still eat the same amount of VRAM. Rough breakdown: SD1.
5 runs fine on 8G; SDXL needs 12G to be comfortable; Flux, even with FP8 quantization, starts at 12G and you’ll want 16G for smooth performance. ControlNet adds another 2-3G on top. A lot of people in the scene who care about value are going with the 4060 Ti 16G, so they don’t have to constantly juggle VRAM.
I mostly do photo editing and color grading, with occasional image generation as a helper—16G works without feeling cramped. If you’re on a tight budget, first see if SDXL covers your needs, don’t jump straight to Flux and blow your cash on a GPU.