Experiment Shows Training AI Image Models at 512 Resolution + Upscaling Saves VRAM

More_Bid_2197 · reddit · 2026-08-01

A developer conducted an image generation experiment: generating a 2048x2048 image in Krea 2, downscaling it to 512, and then upscaling it back to 2048x2048 using SeedVR2. The final result was nearly identical to the original.

Based on this, the author proposes a compute-efficient workflow: instead of training models at very high resolutions (which is slow and VRAM-heavy), one could theoretically train a "supermodel" with an excellent VAE at 512 resolution and pair it with an upscaler like SeedVR2. However, the current bottleneck is that existing VAEs severely distort trained faces at low resolutions like 512.

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