[aiappreciator]

Midjourney is completely different from SD on a computational level. SD is optimized for speed, it takes 5 seconds to generate a 512x512, and their internal optimizations are bringing it down to 0.5 seconds (stated on their twitter). To achieve this, they do one-shot generation straight to 512x512, without upscaling slowly from 64x64 -> 256x256 -> 512x512

Midjourney is optimized for quality. It actually does do the gradual upscaling, which is how the Imagen and Ediffi papers demonstrated. This results in far better quality, but extremely taxing and slow. Even on 'fast' mode it runs like a snail compared to SD. I don't think it'll work on anything below a A100.