How-to·October 16, 2026, 08:25

Open image model from Black Forest Labs can run on smaller GPUs

AI-generated from the sources listed, with automated source checks.

FLUX 3 Image Klein is an open image model that can both generate and edit images. Hugging Face has measured speed and memory use on powerful data center cards.

Black Forest Labs has released FLUX 3 Image Klein on Hugging Face, a platform where people can download AI models. The model is a so-called open-weight model. That means the model's weights can be downloaded and run on your own computer, rather than only being used through an online service.

The model has about 5.6 billion parameters, the numbers an AI model has learned. The Hugging Face blog describes it as a 6 billion parameter model. It can generate images from text, edit images and create new images from multiple reference images.

Two versions with different strengths

The model comes in two main versions. The base version uses 50 steps and, according to Hugging Face, delivers higher quality. The distilled version is a slimmer variant that uses 16 steps and is optimized for speed. There is also a ComfyUI version, a program many people use to build workflows with image models, and a demo space where you can try the model.

For smaller GPUs (graphics cards), there are quantized versions, called fp8r and nvfp4. Quantization means the model's numbers are stored more compactly, so it takes up less space.

Speed and memory

Hugging Face measured the distilled model generating a 1024×1024 pixel image in about 1.93 seconds on an H100 card. Editing with one reference image took about 3.87 seconds, and layout editing took about 4.10 seconds.

Peak memory use was 13.4-15.3 GiB for nvfp4 on an RTX 6000 card, 14.35-16.27 GiB for fp8r on an H100 and 18.8-20.72 GiB for bf16 on an H100. The measurements were made on data center cards, so they do not directly say anything about how the model runs on ordinary consumer cards.

Interest

In the Hugging Face collection, the base version had about 25.4 thousand downloads, and the distilled version about 22.8 thousand. The ComfyUI version stood at about 73.8 thousand. The figures are a snapshot with no stated time period.

Both the measurements and the figures come from Hugging Face. The sources do not indicate that an independent party has tested the model.