I'm curious about what makes this project special, see there's a lot of similar implementations of diffusion models based on pytorch/tf. Is it because it use the cpu itself to produce the diffusion process?
Yeah. For something like this, you ideally would want a powerful GPU with 12-24gb VRAM. If you have something like an RTX 2070 at the bare minimum, you probably don't need this and could do a lot more steps a lot faster on a GPU, but it's great for those who don't have that option.
A $500 RTX 3070 with 8GB of VRAM can generate 512x512 images with 50 steps in 7 seconds.
The RTX 2070 also shipped with 8GB of VRAM, just fyi.
Yep, 8GB works fine. The 2070 is where I started. I wouldn't consider it ideal, though. There will be cases where you'll wish you could increase the resolution a little more, or could do just a few more per batch, but you're getting CUDA out-of-memory errors