Replying to my own post… I had to find this on a YouTube video that didn’t have a lot of views.
On the cloud, Starlight Fast and Starlight Best are completely different than Starlight Mini. Starlight Mini is strictly a local model, and tends to produce softer results that look closer to the other local GAN models that TVAI uses, even though it’s technically a diffusion model. Starlight Fast and Starlight Best are strictly cloud models that use diffusion. Starlight Fast probably actually works best most of the time and produces results that are pretty close to indistinguishable from Starlight Best. Edit 9/15/25 - In my testing I have found that this is not true.
The author of the above video prefers Starlight Mini; I think it’s too soft.
It is also important to note (as discussed and shown in the above video) that Starlight Fast and Best got an update in June 2025 that greatly improved their output, so if you tried Starlight cloud before then and didn’t care for the results, you might want to try it again.
