AI tools, sliced by what you actually want to do.
Each page is a hand-curated set of picks for one creative goal, with honest trade-offs and the hardware tier you'll need. Don't see your use case? Try the Stack Builder — it picks for any hardware budget.
Best AI tools for cinematic video generation
Local video generation is unusually memory-sensitive. The useful question is not only which card you own, but which model variant, resolution, frame count, precision, and offload strategy you can accept.
Best AI tools for anime and illustration
Anime and illustration workflows live almost entirely in the SDXL / SD1.5 ecosystem. The model itself matters less than the LoRA + ControlNet stack you build around it.
Best AI tools for photoreal portraits and characters
Photoreal portrait work has shifted hard toward Flux since 2024. Whether Flux beats SDXL for you depends on whether you have the VRAM, and whether you need consistent characters across frames.
Best AI tools for a local AI coding assistant
Running your coding assistant locally keeps your codebase off third-party servers and removes rate-limit anxiety. The right pick is more about the runner than the model — they're all interchangeable at the API layer.
Best AI tools for LoRA training and fine-tuning
Training a LoRA is the most demanding thing you can do on a consumer GPU. The trainer matters less than the workflow around it — dataset curation, captioning, and inference testing all live in the same pipeline.
Best AI tools for upscaling, restoration and post-processing
Upscaling and restoration is the most underrated lane in local AI — it's where you can produce genuinely impressive output on entry-level hardware, because the per-frame VRAM cost is low.