How many SDXL images does a dollar buy on a rented GPU? It depends on the card, the batch size and whether you pay for torch.compile , so I measured it. Today (2026-10-27) I rented four single-GPU machines on Runcrate, ran the same SDXL script on each, and terminated them as soon as the numbers were on disk.

Short version: an RTX A6000 made 1,000 images for $0.91, an RTX 5090 for $0.93, an L40S for $1.01 and an H100 for $1.80. The H100 was the fastest by far, 1.67 s per image against 4.94 s on the A6000, and the most expensive per image.

Setup

Model: stabilityai/stable-diffusion-xl-base-1.0 , fp16 weights, with the madebyollin/sdxl-vae-fp16-fix VAE.…