ComfyUI render times: Windows 11 vs CachyOS, RTX 3060 Ti vs RTX 5070 Ti

All I really wanted was to finish a music video. For “Warum machst du das?” I had ComfyUI render every shot four times so I could pick the best take. Along the way I accidentally ended up with a pretty decent benchmark: more than 230 runs across two operating systems, two graphics cards and a kernel trick that gives my old card a kick.

Here are the numbers. And since I like charts, there are several of them.

The contenders

• Windows 11 with an RTX 3060 Ti (8 GB): my PC as it runs most of the time.
• CachyOS with an RTX 3060 Ti: the same PC, just on Linux. CachyOS is an Arch-based distribution tuned for speed.
• CachyOS with an RTX 3060 Ti and gpu-unlock: same PC, same card, plus a kernel module that releases a brake inside the GPU. More on that in a moment.
• Windows 11 with an RTX 5070 Ti (16 GB): a machine at Ascot Media that took over part of the lip-sync shots.

The job was always the same: 10 seconds of video in full HD at 48 frames per second, the same workflow, four attempts per shot with different seeds. The times come from ComfyUI screenshots or, where there weren’t any, from the file timestamps.

One thing up front so nobody compares apples with oranges: the RTX 5070 Ti only rendered lip-sync shots, and Windows on the 3060 Ti only rendered scenes without singing. That’s why there are two groups, and comparisons only happen within a group.

Windows vs Linux: 30 percent less waiting

The biggest jump doesn’t come from new hardware but from the operating system. On Windows 11 my 3060 Ti needed a median of 10:09 minutes per clip; on CachyOS, same card, just 7:06. That’s 30 percent less waiting, or put the other way round: in the same time Linux gets through about 43 percent more clips.

To be fair, only one shot ran on Windows during the project (S08, the title shot down the shelter corridor), so four runs. That isn’t much. But the times match what I know from earlier renders on Windows, so I believe the gap is real and not a fluke.

I can’t say for sure why the gap is that wide. My guess: the 3060 Ti only has 8 GB of video memory. When it runs short, the NVIDIA driver on Windows quietly spills into regular system RAM instead of stopping with an error. That saves the run but costs a lot of time. Linux has no such emergency exit, and the desktop takes up less video memory there.

gpu-unlock: releasing the handbrake

gpu-unlock is a Linux kernel module by Zagitta. The idea: GeForce cards run certain tensor operations (FP16, BF16 and TF32 with FP32 accumulation) at only half rate, even though the same chip runs them at full rate in the professional cards. The module lifts that limit at boot, before the NVIDIA driver takes over the card. No driver patch, no BIOS flash. According to the project page the output is bit-identical, just faster.

It supports the RTX 20, 30 and 40 series, with only the RTX 30 series considered stable. The 3060 Ti is one of them. RTX 50 cards like the 5070 Ti aren’t supported, and neither is Windows.

On my machine the module took the scenes without singing from 7:06 down to 6:22 minutes: 10 percent less time, or about 12 percent more speed. Doesn’t sound like much at first. Across the 71 runs of phase A, though, that’s a good 50 minutes I didn’t have to spend waiting. For a module that costs nothing, I’ll take it.

RTX 5070 Ti: the new card is barely faster

Now the part that surprised me most. In the second lip-sync round both machines rendered in parallel. The unlocked 3060 Ti on CachyOS came in at a median of 7:44 minutes, the RTX 5070 Ti on Windows 11 at 7:05. So the new card is only 9 percent faster.

Against the unlocked card on Linux, though, the 5070 Ti starts with two handicaps: it runs on Windows, and there’s no unlock for it. On top of that it’s a different machine with a different CPU, different RAM and its own ComfyUI install. So this isn’t a clean lab comparison.

A thought experiment, explicitly not a measurement: if you apply the gap between Windows and unlocked Linux from phase A to the lip-sync shots, my 3060 Ti on Windows would need roughly 12:20 minutes for them. On the same operating system the 5070 Ti would then need about 43 percent less time. That’s more like what you’d expect from a new card. I’d genuinely love to know how fast it would be on CachyOS.

The first attempt always takes longer

One thing stands out in the dot chart: the hollow dots, the first attempt of each shot, mostly sit to the right of the rest. During the first run the models get loaded into memory. On Windows with the 3060 Ti that hurt: 14:03 minutes for the first attempt of S08, then just over 10 each. Render a single clip and you pay that surcharge every time. Render many in a row and you pay it once per shot.

What others measure

I wanted to know whether my numbers fit the bigger picture, so I went looking for reports, ideally from people who measured things themselves.

Linux vs Windows is a perennial topic in the ComfyUI and Stable Diffusion forums, and the answers are all over the place. One user with an RTX 5090 compared Pop!_OS and a fresh Windows 11 with identical software and measured practically the same speed for Wan 2.1 LoRA training (1.17 vs 1.19 seconds per step). Another reckons Linux is 10 to 15 percent faster but doesn’t think it’s worth the hassle. One even rendered Illustrious images a few seconds slower on Linux Mint than on Windows. And a Reddit user covered by Analytics India Magazine saw 50 to 60 percent more speed for image generation on Ubuntu.

My impression: on big cards with lots of video memory the difference is small. The tighter the memory, the more Linux can gain. My 8 GB card, at 43 percent, sits towards the top end.

For gpu-unlock the reports are far more consistent. The project page lists typical gains from user reports of 30 to 55 percent for image generation and 15 to 20 percent for video generation with Wan 2.2. A user with an RTX 3060 12 GB on Arch measured in ComfyUI: SDXL from 1.44 to 1.95 steps per second (plus 35 percent), the DiT model Anima plus 39 percent, INT8 models with no noticeable change. An RTX 3090 Ti owner got 46 to 59 percent on image models and very mixed results on video: only 17 percent for LTX-2.5 distilled, but 60 percent for MiniMax H3.

So my 12 percent sits below the typical range for video. I suspect part of my workflow simply doesn’t benefit from the unlock. The module only speeds up maths in FP16, BF16 and TF32. According to the project page nothing changes for INT8, FP8 and INT4 models, and anything limited by memory rather than compute won’t get faster either. On top of that, my 8 GB card doesn’t have much headroom.

I found hardly any direct comparisons between the 3060 Ti and the 5070 Ti with video workflows. Most reports put the 5070 Ti up against the 5060 Ti or the 5090. If you have numbers of your own, I’m curious.

My takeaway

• The operating system makes the biggest difference. On my 3060 Ti, Linux saves about 30 percent of the time, for free and without new hardware.
• gpu-unlock is worth it if you’re rendering on Linux with an RTX 30 card anyway. For me it was 10 percent; others report a lot more with image models.
• On Windows, the RTX 5070 Ti is only slightly faster than my unlocked 3060 Ti on Linux. Its big advantage is the 16 GB of video memory, not the speed in this workflow.

So if you’re thinking about buying a new card for ComfyUI: trying Linux first costs nothing but a weekend.

All render times of the music video and the full diary are on the project page.

Sources

• Zagitta/gpu-unlock on GitHub
• Compatibility report RTX 3060 12 GB with ComfyUI measurements (issue #65)
• ComfyUI Wiki: RTX 30 Series BF16 Unlock Speeds Up ComfyUI by Up to 60%
• Reddit discussion: RTX 5090 on Pop!_OS and Windows 11 (archived copy)
• Reddit discussion: Linux Mint vs Windows (archived copy)
• r/StableDiffusion: “Linux or Windows? Linux, right?” (archived copy)
• Analytics India Magazine: Inference is 3x Faster in Linux than in Windows