1. Prerequisites
In order for ZTX37 to work, your computer needs
- to run Windows 10 or higher,
- have a modern NVIDIA graphic card,
- have at least 10GB free disk space,
- an internet connection.
If you have such a system, you can generate tons of images on your own computer without using on-line services and benefit from all extra features ZTX37 offers. Once you experienced the difference you don't want to go back. The above is all you need,
ZTX37 might work on systems with lighter specs, but if it does, it will do so slow. ZXT37 uses as its kernel Stable Diffusion XL which requires a video card with at least 12GB. Though, with 8GB you'll do fine too.
You need a NVIDIA graphic cards because ZTX37 uses the CUDA protocol which is native to NVIDIA. However, if you have a modern AMD card, you could try using ZLUDA , that is a tool that emulates CUDA on a AMD graphic card.
High speed internet is not a requirement. You might want to download a few models but other than that image generation happens off-line. Internet is not needed at all to run ZTX37.
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2. Get ZTX37
The installer is straightforward, allowing you to choose to install it for one user or all users, create a shortcut, and select the installation folder. It couldn't be more basic than this.
If you already have ZTX37 installed and want to update to the latest version, the installer will detect the existing installation and perform the update.
Please note that both the installer and ZTX37 are unsigned, so Windows
will display some warning messages. I apologize for this inconvenience. Obtaining a digital signature is quite costly, and I haven’t been able to prioritize it yet. If you would like to support this effort, please consider making a
donation to help overcome this hurdle.
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3. First run
ZTX37 is as an empty brain. It needs a model that fills that brain with valuable weights. ZTX37 uses Stable Diffusion XL models. There are a whole bunch of these available on-line, commonly for free.
If you do not have any models yet, ZTX37 notices this at startup and opens the model page for you with amongst other things a small list of models. Choose one and a download will start.
Downloading will take a while ,it happens in the background. Until a first model is downloaded, ZTX37 is rather useless. You'll have to have some patience.
More about the models page, here...
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4. Done!
You can now start working with ZTX37.
A good habit is to create a small test image first. Just to see it working.
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5. Ini File
Normally you would not be busy with the ZTX37.Ini file, but I explain it here, for those with special needs.
For those new to ZTX37, or not used to edit Ini files, Ignore this:
ZTX37 does store its information, among which generated images, in its data file. This file can become pretty big. It is located in %appdata%\ztx37.
This database can become pretty big. Think about gigabytes when keeping 1000's of images in it.
You can specify a different location. For that find ZTX37.ini and follow the instructions in that file.
ZTX37.Ini can also come in handy for those who want two copies of ZTX37 running on their computer. This can be done following these two steps:
- Copy all files from the installation folder to a different folder
- In the new folder specify a different database location in ZTX37.ini
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Troubles?
All I get is an error message on startup
A nerdy message about objects, pointers, references or any like that? Your PC might not have dot net 8 installed or ZTX37 is in a folder where it can't write its data.
It looks complicated
Oh! And we tried so hard making it all logical and user-friendly.
Take the quick tour!
And join us on discord, where we all help each other.
It is slow )):
You might have hardware that can't pull it faster than this, the graphic card often is a bottleneck. Perhaps you can close a few other apps on your computer, surely the ones with graphics (games!) could slow ZTX37 down. See if that makes speed somewhat reasonable.
For trying out things, you could generate images using not to much energy and guidance and/or use a strategy from the performance section.
Very low speeds can be annoying, but ZTX37 can also do a lot of work when you are not there.. You could at least get an idea if you find it worth the investment of an expensive graphic card.
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