What one generated image costs in electricity on each GPU we’ve measured, at one dated price: 18.31 cents per kWh, the US residential average for July 2026. Power is the board’s own reading from each card’s driver. The page has two bar charts (cents per 1,000 images and seconds per image) and shows the arithmetic once, so you can redo it at your own rate.
FLUX.2 [klein] 4B, 1024×1024, 8 steps, one pinned ComfyUI stack, images drawn back to back for ten minutes. Cents of board electricity per 1,000 images:
– RTX 5090 Laptop GPU 24 GB, Dynamic Boost: 3.37 cents (4.48 s per image)
– RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition 96 GB at 300 W: 3.39 cents (2.30 s)
– ZOTAC RTX 5080 Solid CORE OC 16 GB at 360 W: 5.04 cents (3.61 s)
– EVGA RTX 3090 Ti FTW3 Ultra 24 GB at 350 W: 8.47 cents (4.97 s)
– EVGA RTX 3090 XC3 Ultra 24 GB at 350 W: 9.13 cents (5.29 s)
– RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition 12 GB at 350 W: 9.71 cents (5.81 s)
Capping the RTX 3090 Ti and the RTX 3090 at 300 W cut the energy per image by about 9 percent, for about 4.5 percent more time per image.
What moves the bill: 8 to 32 steps costs 3.5 to 3.9 times as much; 512×512 to 1024×1024 costs 3.0 to 3.3 times; 1024×1024 to 2048×1280 costs 2.7 to 2.9 times. Z-Image-Turbo costs 1.5 to 1.6 times klein, and FLUX.1 [dev] fp8 costs 2.1 to 2.5 times.
Cheapest picture we’ve measured: 0.79 cents per 1,000 (klein, 512×512, 8 steps, the laptop GPU held to 95 W, one image’s share of a batch of three). Dearest: about 150 cents per 1,000 (Z-Image-Turbo, 2048×1280, 32 steps, on an RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition 12 GB with part of the model streamed over PCIe each step).
Board vs wall, the one reading we have both ways: a batch of three klein images on an RTX 3090 at 250 W read 1.27 Wh at the card and 1.87 Wh at the wall meter, 1.47 times as much.
Caveats: board power, not the wall (except that one reading); cross-card comparisons are “same software, different computer”; every run had ComfyUI’s debug log on, so a normal setup should match or beat these figures; no idle cost is billed; and the price is a national average, not anyone’s bill.
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