Hardware Requirements

Invoke runs on Windows 10+, macOS 14+ and Linux (Ubuntu 20.04+ is well-tested).

Hardware

Hardware requirements vary significantly depending on model and image output size.

The requirements below are rough guidelines for best performance. GPUs with less VRAM typically still work, if a bit slower. Follow the Low VRAM Guide to optimize performance.

• All Apple Silicon (M1, M2, etc) Macs work, but 16GB+ memory is recommended.
• Nvidia GPUs need compute capability 7.5 or newer (GTX 16xx, RTX 20xx and everything after) and a driver from the R580 series or newer. Maxwell, Pascal and Volta cards (GTX 9xx/10xx, Titan V, Tesla P40/P100/V100) are not supported by Invoke’s CUDA build: stay on the previous Invoke release, or do a manual install with --torch-backend=cu126, whose PyTorch build still includes these GPUs (not tested by the Invoke team). With a driver that is too old, Invoke starts on the CPU and logs an error saying so; on an unsupported GPU it logs an error at startup and generation fails.
• AMD GPUs are supported on Linux only. The VRAM requirements are the same as Nvidia GPUs.
• Intel Arc GPUs (Alchemist, Battlemage and newer) are supported on Windows and Linux x86_64. The VRAM requirements are the same as Nvidia GPUs.
• Linux ARM64 (aarch64) devices — e.g. Raspberry Pi 5, other SBCs, ARM servers — are supported in CPU-only mode. Local generation is slow without a GPU, but API-backed models (e.g. GPT Image, Gemini) work well.

Windows/Linux

Model Family	Best resolution	GPU (series)	VRAM (min)	RAM (min)	Notes
SD1.5	512x512	Nvidia 16xx+	4GB	8GB
SDXL	1024x1024	Nvidia 20xx+	8GB	16GB
FLUX.1	1024x1024	Nvidia 20xx+	10GB	32GB	Download totals: NF4 ~12GB, int8 ~18GB, bf16 ~33GB. The int8 transformer is 11.5GB resident on any supported GPU, so it streams on a 10GB card
FLUX.2 Klein 4B	1024x1024	Nvidia 30xx+	12GB	16GB	FP8 works with 8GB+; Diffusers + encoder
FLUX.2 Klein 9B	1024x1024	Nvidia 30xx+	12GB	32GB	int8 transformer ~9.5GB on any supported GPU; FP8 checkpoints stay about as small with FP8 Storage, which installation switches on. The Qwen3 8B encoder is 15GB (int8 7.6GB) and streams on a 12GB card
Z-Image Turbo	1024x1024	Nvidia 20xx+	8GB	16GB	Q4_K / NVFP4 / int8 8GB (int8 ~6GB resident); Q8/BF16 16GB+
Krea-2 (Turbo / Raw)	1024x1024	Nvidia 40xx	24GB	32GB	FP8 works with 16GB+; NVFP4 or GGUF Q4_K transformer ~7GB, plus the Qwen3-VL encoder (8.5GB bf16, ~2.8GB as GGUF Q4_K), int8 transformer 12.6GB. Diffusers ~26GB; single files need a standalone VAE + Qwen3-VL encoder (GGUF encoder ~2.8GB)
Ideogram 4	1024x1024	Nvidia 30xx+	24GB	32GB	Two transformers resident at once. nf4 build fits 24GB (CUDA only); single-file fp8 or int8 pair ~17.5GB plus the Qwen3-VL 8B encoder. See Ideogram 4
ERNIE-Image	1024x1024	Nvidia 40xx	24GB	32GB	Single-file transformer ~16GB plus the Ministral 3B encoder ~7.7GB
Wan 2.2 A14B (T2V/I2V)	1280x720	Nvidia 30xx+	12GB	32GB	Dual-expert MoE; Q4_K_M 12GB; Q8 18GB+; Diffusers requires 32GB+
Wan 2.2 TI2V-5B	1280x720	Nvidia 20xx+	8GB	16GB	Single transformer; Q4_K_M 6GB+; Q8 8GB+; Diffusers 12GB+

tmpfs on Linux

If your temporary directory is mounted as a tmpfs, ensure it has sufficient space.

Python

The launcher installs python for you

You don’t need to do this if you are installing with the Invoke Launcher.

Invoke requires python 3.12. Newer versions, 3.13 included, are not supported yet.

Check which version you have by running python3 --version in the terminal (Linux, macOS) or cmd/powershell (Windows).

Installing Python

Windows

1. Install python with an official installer.
2. The installer includes an option to add python to your PATH. Be sure to enable this. If you missed it, re-run the installer, choose to modify an existing installation, and tick that checkbox.
3. You may need to install Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable.

MacOS

1. Install python with an official installer.
2. If model installs fail with a certificate error, you may need to run this command: /Applications/Python\ 3.12/Install\ Certificates.command
3. If you haven’t already, you will need to install the XCode CLI Tools by running xcode-select --install in a terminal.

Linux

1. Installing python varies depending on your system. We recommend using uv to manage your python installation.
2. You’ll need to install libglib2.0-0 and libgl1-mesa-glx for OpenCV to work. For example, on a Debian system: sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y libglib2.0-0 libgl1-mesa-glx

Drivers

If you have an Nvidia, AMD or Intel GPU, you may need to manually install drivers or other support packages for things to work well or at all.

Intel

Intel Arc support uses PyTorch’s native XPU backend, so no separate oneAPI toolkit install is required — the runtime libraries come in with the xpu torch wheels. You do need an up-to-date GPU driver.

• Windows: install the latest Intel Arc & Iris Xe Graphics driver. Older drivers are a common cause of failures on Battlemage cards.
• Linux: install the client GPU driver packages by following the Intel client GPU install guide. Kernel 6.8+ (or the xe/i915 backport packages) is required.

Verify the GPU is visible to PyTorch:

python -c "import torch; print(torch.xpu.is_available(), torch.xpu.device_count())"

Integrated GPUs

Level Zero enumerates your CPU’s integrated GPU alongside any discrete Arc card. Invoke excludes integrated GPUs from automatic device selection when a discrete GPU is present. To use one anyway, name it explicitly in the generation_devices setting.

An integrated GPU shares its memory with the CPU, so Invoke does not keep a second RAM copy of a model’s weights there — that copy would double each model’s footprint against the same memory. keep_ram_copy_of_weights is ignored on such a device, and a warning says so once. Partial loading still applies, so device residency stays bounded.

Both an Nvidia and an Intel GPU?

Automatic device selection prefers CUDA: if any Nvidia GPU is visible, auto enumerates only those and your Arc card is left unused. Name it explicitly to generate on it, e.g. generation_devices: [xpu:0].

Free VRAM reporting

Some driver and kernel combinations — notably GPU passthrough VMs and WSL2 — cannot report free VRAM to PyTorch. Invoke falls back to estimating it, which ignores memory used by other processes on the same GPU. If you share the GPU with other workloads and hit out-of-memory errors, set max_cache_vram_gb explicitly rather than relying on the estimate. A warning is logged once per device when this fallback is in use.

Nvidia

Run nvidia-smi on your system’s command line to verify that drivers and CUDA are installed. If this command fails, or doesn’t report versions, you will need to install drivers.

Go to the CUDA Toolkit Downloads and carefully follow the instructions for your system to get everything installed.

Confirm that nvidia-smi displays driver and CUDA versions after installation.

Invoke’s CUDA build (PyTorch 2.13 with CUDA 13.0) needs an Nvidia driver from the R580 series or newer. See Hardware for the supported GPUs.

Linux - via Nvidia Container Runtime

An alternative to installing CUDA locally is to use the Nvidia Container Runtime to run the application in a container.

Windows - Nvidia cuDNN DLLs

An out-of-date cuDNN library can greatly hamper performance on 30-series and 40-series cards. Check with the community on discord to compare your it/s if you think you may need this fix.

First, locate the destination for the DLL files and make a quick back up:

1. Find your InvokeAI installation folder, e.g. C:\Users\Username\InvokeAI\.
2. Open the .venv folder, e.g. C:\Users\Username\InvokeAI\.venv (you may need to show hidden files to see it).
3. Navigate deeper to the torch package, e.g. C:\Users\Username\InvokeAI\.venv\Lib\site-packages\torch.
4. Copy the lib folder inside torch and back it up somewhere.

Next, download and copy the updated cuDNN DLLs:

1. Go to the Cuda Docs.
2. Create an account if needed and log in.
3. Choose the newest version of cuDNN that works with your GPU architecture. Consult the cuDNN support matrix to determine the correct version for your GPU.
4. Download the latest version and extract it.
5. Find the bin folder, e.g. cudnn-windows-x86_64-SOME_VERSION\bin.
6. Copy and paste the .dll files into the lib folder you located earlier. Replace files when prompted.

If, after restarting the app, this doesn’t improve your performance, either restore your back up or re-run the installer to reset torch back to its original state.

AMD

Linux Only

AMD GPUs are supported on Linux only, due to ROCm (the AMD equivalent of CUDA) support being Linux only.

Bumps Ahead

While the application does run on AMD GPUs, there are occasional bumps related to spotty torch support.

MIOpen kernel search

Invoke starts with MIOPEN_FIND_MODE=FAST so that MIOpen (ROCm’s convolution library) does not spend minutes benchmarking kernels the first time each convolution shape runs - most noticeable on the video VAEs, which run many distinct shapes. Export MIOPEN_FIND_MODE yourself to override it (for example MIOPEN_FIND_MODE=NORMAL to let MIOpen re-tune its kernel database).

Wide-head attention runs on the math kernel

On ROCm builds Invoke routes attention whose head dimension exceeds 256 to PyTorch’s math kernel. The fused kernels return wrong output there on torch 2.13 / ROCm 7.2 (measured on a W7900), which showed up as black or noisy images from the image VAEs - their mid-block attention is one 512-wide head. The math kernel builds the whole attention matrix (about 4 GB for a 1024px VAE decode, 21 GB at 1536px), so Invoke computes it in pieces of at most 1 GB. The result can differ from a single math call in the last bit of a bf16 value, and each such call is roughly 10% slower. Export INVOKE_ROCM_FUSED_SDPA_MAX_HEAD_DIM to raise the threshold on a build whose fused kernels are known to be correct.

Attention without a fused kernel

Where PyTorch has no fused attention kernel for a call, it runs on the math kernel as well, and Invoke computes that in pieces of at most 1 GB too. That is what makes large models and resolutions usable on such builds: Z-Image at 1024px would otherwise build 8 GB of attention scores per call, Krea-2 almost 13 GB.

Idle process pegging one CPU core

After GPU work, ROCm’s HSA runtime can leave its internal AsyncEventsLoop thread busy-spinning on one CPU core indefinitely instead of blocking - a livelock in libhsa-runtime64.so, not an Invoke bug (see ROCm/ROCm#6522 and ROCm/TheRock#7051). It inflates rocm-smi’s GPU-busy% reading too, so it can look like a stuck generation when the queue is actually idle. If you see this, export HSA_TOOLS_DISABLE_REGISTER=1 before launching Invoke; unset it only if you need rocprof/ROCTracer-based kernel profiling, which this disables.

Run rocm-smi on your system’s command line verify that drivers and ROCm are installed. If this command fails, or doesn’t report versions, you will need to install them.

Go to the ROCm Documentation and carefully follow the instructions for your system to get everything installed.

Confirm that rocm-smi displays driver and CUDA versions after installation.

Linux - via Docker Container

An alternative to installing ROCm locally is to use a ROCm docker container to run the application in a container.