Model reference · open weights
playground-512px is an open-weight image model from playgroundai. playground-v2-512px-base (FP32) weighs 6.9 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.
Summary of the playgroundai/playground-v2-512px-base model card, 2026-10-01
What it is
| Released by | playgroundai |
|---|---|
| Released | 2023-11-30 |
| Parameters | 2.6B |
| VRAM | 6.9 GB for the weights |
What it runs on
| Card | One image | Memory |
|---|---|---|
| RTX 3060 12 GB | tight (encoders offloaded) | 11.6 GB |
| RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB | fits | 15.4 GB |
| RTX 3090 24 GB | fits | 23.4 GB |
| RTX 4090 24 GB | fits | 23.4 GB |
| RTX 5090 32 GB | fits | 31.0 GB |
| L40S 48 GB | fits | 44.0 GB |
| A100 80 GB | fits | 78.2 GB |
| H100 80 GB | fits | 78.1 GB |
| RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB | fits | 93.8 GB |
| DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified | fits | 107 GB |
| H200 141 GB | fits | 138 GB |
| B200 180 GB | fits | 176 GB |
From the model card
This repository contains a base (pre-train) model that generates images of resolution 512x512.
This model is primarily for research purposes. It does not tend to produce highly aesthetic images.
You can use the model with Hugging Face 🧨 Diffusers.
Playground v2 is a diffusion-based text-to-image generative model. The model was trained from scratch by the research team at Playground.
Images generated by Playground v2 are favored 2.5 times more than those produced by Stable Diffusion XL, according to Playground’s user study.
We are thrilled to release intermediate checkpoints at different training stages, including evaluation metrics, to the community. We hope this will encourage further research into foundational models for image generation.
Lastly, we introduce a new benchmark, MJHQ-30K, for automatic evaluation of a model’s aesthetic quality.
Please see our blog for more details.
Install diffusers >= 0.24.0 and some dependencies:
pip install transformers accelerate safetensors
To use the model, run:
from diffusers import DiffusionPipeline
import torch
pipe = DiffusionPipeline.from_pretrained(
"playgroundai/playground-v2-512px-base",
torch_dtype=torch.float16,
use_safetensors=True,
add_watermarker=False,
variant="fp16",
)
pipe.to("cuda")
prompt = "Astronaut in a jungle, cold color palette, muted colors, detailed, 8k"
image = pipe(prompt=prompt, width=512, height=512).images[0]
According to user studies conducted by Playground, involving over 2,600 prompts and thousands of users, the images generated by Playground v2 are favored 2.5 times more than those produced by Stable Diffusion XL.
We report user preference metrics on PartiPrompts, following standard practice, and on an internal prompt dataset curated by the Playground team. The “Internal 1K” prompt dataset is diverse and covers various categories and tasks.
During the user study, we give users instructions to evaluate image pairs based on both (1) their aesthetic preference and (2) the image-text alignment.
| Model | Overall FID |
|---|---|
| SDXL-1-0-refiner | 9.55 |
| playground-v2-1024px-aesthetic | 7.07 |
We introduce a new benchmark, MJHQ-30K, for automatic evaluation of a model’s aesthetic quality. The benchmark computes FID on a high-quality dataset to gauge aesthetic quality.
We have curated a high-quality dataset from Midjourney, featuring 10 common categories, with each category containing 3,000 samples. Following common practice, we use aesthetic score and CLIP score to ensure high image quality and high image-text alignment. Furthermore, we take extra care to make the data diverse within each category.
For Playground v2, we report both the overall FID and per-category FID. All FID metrics are computed at resolution 1024x1024. Our benchmark results show that our model outperforms SDXL-1-0-refiner in overall FID and all category FIDs, especially in people and fashion categories. This is in line with the results of the user study, which indicates a correlation between human preference and FID score on the MJHQ-30K benchmark.
We release this benchmark to the public and encourage the community to adopt it for benchmarking their models’ aesthetic quality.
| Model | FID | Clip Score |
|---|---|---|
| SDXL-1-0-refiner | 13.04 | 32.62 |
| playground-v2-256px-base | 9.83 | 31.90 |
| playground-v2-512px-base | 9.55 | 32.08 |
Apart from playground-v2-1024px-aesthetic, we release intermediate checkpoints at different training stages to the community in order to foster foundation model research in pixels. Here, we report the FID score and CLIP score on the MSCOCO14 evaluation set for the reference purposes. (Note that our reported numbers may differ from the numbers reported in SDXL’s published results, as our prompt list may be different.)
@misc{playground-v2,
url={[https://huggingface.co/playgroundai/playground-v2-1024px-aesthetic](https://huggingface.co/playgroundai/playground-v2-1024px-aesthetic)},
title={Playground v2},
author={Li, Daiqing and Kamko, Aleks and Sabet, Ali and Akhgari, Ehsan and Xu, Lin and Doshi, Suhail}
}
Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.
Running it yourself
Rent a machine by the hour. Runs as it is with diffusers, on the machine, in Python.
# on your rented machine: pip install diffusers transformers accelerate
import torch
from diffusers import DiffusionPipeline
pipe = DiffusionPipeline.from_pretrained("playgroundai/playground-v2-512px-base", torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16).to("cuda")
image = pipe(prompt="a red bicycle on a cobbled street").images[0]
image.save("/workspace/out.png")