Just saw another post titled “Best GPUs for Running CHROMA in 2026” — conclusion is basically 4090 is the best, next best is 4070 Ti Super 16G, floor is 4060 Ti 16G. Alright, I don’t disagree with the conclusion, but it’s like saying nothing at all — everyone knows the 4090 is good, but tell me why it has to be 16G specifically.
It says CHROMA is a transformer-based diffusion model, and the intermediate representations during denoising eat up a lot of VRAM, unlike SDXL where you can squeeze it down with regular tricks. That part is barely plausible. But claims like “below 16G you have to go aggressive quantization and image quality drops noticeably” — have they actually compared the same seeds across different VRAM sizes? Feels like most of these “reviews” are just copy-pasting spec sheets with an Amazon affiliate link. I’ve been running it on my 12G card with quantization, and honestly, I don’t see it falling apart visually. Hardware requirements — both manufacturers and affiliates have a motive to inflate them. You gotta test it yourself to know for sure.