We got to see a demonstration of a cool ComfyUI template that NVIDIA created to showcase how quickly their RTX 5090 GPU can process image generation locally on a laptop computer. Most people think we need a high-end server farm in the cloud to do all of these new “Artificial Intelligence” imagery, video, and text generation, but there are numerous smaller models that can actually run locally and can run pretty nicely if you have the proper hardware.
ComfyUI is a node-based interface for creating workflows that interact with various AI models. The latest version gets a performance boost with NVIDIA’s RTX GPUs as well.
NVIDIA’s demo ComfyUI template was set up to take a picture from the web cam, recognize the person in the photo, then use a Stable Diffusion model to create a variety of fictional super hero images and poses of that person. In addition, the template was programmed to add NVIDIA logos to the corner and also use colors that coordinate with NVIDIA’s branding.
Generating 6 AI images only took seconds with the amazing NVIDIA RTX 5090 mobile GPU!
I love ComfyUI though it certainly does have a bit of a learning curve and works best with some expensive hardware, but running generative AI models locally can be a lot less expensive and privacy friendly than running them through a cloud subscription service.