Checkpoint Arena

Mission

Checkpoint Arena is a free and open source hobbyist project, with the goal of providing a quick overview of the results generated by many popular Stable Diffusion checkpoints with a set of uniform, standardized and simple prompts.

Methodology

Overview

All images you can browse and compare on this page were created using a uniform process, with the following parameters:

Checkpoint: whatever checkpoint you select.
Positive prompt: the selected positive prompt, which you can see in full when looking at the details of any image. These prompts are generally kept as short and simple as possible, e.g. "running horse".
Negative Prompt: there are three options available for the negative prompt:
- None: no negative prompt (completely empty)
- Default: uses the EasyNegative negative embedding
- SFW: adds "nsfw, naked, nude" to the default negative prompt to ensure that the generated images are SFW
Seed: 6 fixed seeds starting from 42 are used for all combinations of the above
Sampler & Steps: the DPM++ SDE Karras sampler is used with 30 iterations, and a CFG of 8.0
Resolution: in the first pass, 512x512 images are generated, which are then upscaled to 1024x1024 with a high-res-fix workflow

Checkpoint Selection

Due to the combinatorial nature of this site, adding a new checkpoint or prompt requires a significant time commitment. At this point, a single new checkpoint adds roughly 50 minutes to the data generation time on an RTX 4090 GPU, and adding a new prompt adds over 4 hours. Therefore, we tried to be somewhat selective with checkpoints, with the following principles:

In general, we selected Checkpoints that are popular on Civitai, either all-time or recently, with some recency bias (since checkpoints generally tend to get better over time).
We try to prioritize adding checkpoints with a unique style over adding more variations on a theme. As an example, we added ArchitectureRealMix despite it having "only" 1.4k likes at the time of this writing, even though there are many other checkpoints which are not yet included that are more popular in absolute numbers. This is because it represents a category of checkpoints which was not included at all before.
We also added some older checkpoints due to their historical significance, or the impact they had on subsequent mixes.

Details and Source Code

Both the code generation of images and the web application you are looking at right now are open source, and available on GitHub:

cpa-generate is the repository for the image and metadata generation
cpa-web is the repository for this web application

The source provides even more details on the methodology, and of course allows you to contribute.

Data