#comparison

The framing most posts use — 'Ollama is easier, llama.cpp is faster' — is from 2024. In 2026 the real question is whether you're running one model for yourself or serving many. Here's the honest decision rule, including where vLLM and SGLang have eaten Ollama's edge.

Replicate, fal.ai, Midjourney, and OpenAI compared for cloud image generation. The billing models differ more than the models do — per-second, per-image, subscription, and token-bundled each win for different usage patterns. Here's the decision tree.

Cloud video generation has the widest price range in AI media — $0.13 to $3.20 per clip. Runway, fal.ai, Pika, and Sora compared on pricing models, quality, and content control, with a decision tree for which provider wins for which use case.

The local-vs-cloud question for AI image and video generation isn't 'which is better.' It's a cost, privacy, and volume calculation — and the answer is different from the one for text. Here's the framework, the break-even math, and where each side actually wins.

We ran the same two 8B models on both cards with byte-identical weights and identical settings. The RX 7900 XT is ~3.9x faster — consistently across both architectures. Here's the full 2x2, what it actually tells you, and where we got the framing wrong the first time.