Model reference · open weights

playground-512px

Image playgroundai Text→image 1 build Its own licence terms 11 dl/mo

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.

  • playground-512px is a 2.6B parameter diffusion-based text-to-image model developed by playgroundai.
  • It generates 512x512 resolution images and is primarily intended for research purposes.
  • The model uses OpenCLIP-ViT/G and CLIP-ViT/L text encoders and is distributed under the Playground v2 Community License.

Summary of the playgroundai/playground-v2-512px-base model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released byplaygroundai
Released2023-11-30
Parameters2.6B
VRAM6.9 GB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for playground-v2-512px-base (FP32)

6.9 GBweights, file size
5.1 GBbiggest part
5.0 GBworking memory, one 1024² image
537 MBruntime overhead
CardOne imageMemory
RTX 3060 12 GBtight (encoders offloaded)11.6 GB
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GBfits15.4 GB
RTX 3090 24 GBfits23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GBfits23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GBfits31.0 GB
L40S 48 GBfits44.0 GB
A100 80 GBfits78.2 GB
H100 80 GBfits78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GBfits93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unifiedfits107 GB
H200 141 GBfits138 GB
B200 180 GBfits176 GB

From the model card

What playgroundai says about playground-512px

Read 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.

Model Description

Using the model with 🧨 Diffusers

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]

User Study

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.

MJHQ-30K Benchmark

ModelOverall FID
SDXL-1-0-refiner9.55
playground-v2-1024px-aesthetic7.07

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.

Intermediate Base Models

ModelFIDClip Score
SDXL-1-0-refiner13.0432.62
playground-v2-256px-base9.8331.90
playground-v2-512px-base9.5532.08

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.)

How to cite us

@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

Run it on a rented GPU

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")
Renting a GPU: connect, tunnels, Python
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