What are you independently running? What are the limitations of your setup in practice, and what level of hardware is really needed in your opinion?
I’m disabled and need at laptop, - for reasons. Looking seriously at System76 options under $3k, so 6-8gbv RTX 4050 or 4060. I want to integrate SD into a Blender CAD workflow. Is this practical?
I think the big thing with SD on nvidia is the CUDA API. I’ve seen posts and articles on the efforts of AMD to push their open source ROCm API as a replacement for proprietary nvidia. I thought I had commented on a post here with an article summary of a white paper showing at the ultra high end, like $10k video cards, AMD is already performing at 80% compared to nvidia, but am having trouble finding that one. I haven’t heard much about what Intel is doing in this space. I think it all comes down to this API and how much it is adopted.
AMD doesn’t sell any suitable consumer cards for SD though and ROCm support is limited to their datacenter GPUs. It can be made to work with consumer GPUs but it is really hit or miss and they drop compatibility with cards barely a few years old.
Intel is working on an open-source CUDA equivalent called oneAPI that works with all major vendors and from what I have heard it is already working better than ROCm for many things.