Same prompts, same seed, three renders per test: self-hosted H3 in
draft (cheap iteration tier) and full
(delivery tier) on a rented Nebius H200 interruptible VM, against fal's
H3 Max. The VM costs $2.45/hr, and a cold boot takes about 45s. Run
2026-08-27. Generation time and cost below are the render itself from a
warm worker, excluding the VM's cold-start time.
Self-hosted setup
The self-hosted side runs on one Nebius H200 interruptible VM: one GPU,
16 vCPUs, 200 GiB of memory, and the NVIDIA H200 NVLink platform. The
queue is nebius-h200.
It runs MiniMax H3, with fl2va loaded by default. That is
the first-and-last-frame-to-video-and-audio variant, using the pruned,
int8, convrot-quantized checkpoint
minimax_h3_fl2va_pruned_int8_convrot.safetensors.
ref2va is the single-reference-image variant;
both loads both checkpoints.
Attention uses NVIDIA's Sol-Attn kernel, not Sage. It
is wired as a self-attention-only override through ComfyUI's
optimized_attention_override, targeting H3's
head_dim=128. The first 20% of denoising steps and first two
transformer blocks stay on dense attention. Dispatch counting makes a
silent dense fallback visible. When Sol-Attn is off, the runtime falls
back to attention_backend() (usually SDPA or Flash, depending
on the environment).
Modes
Mode controls the speed/quality trade-off. The variant is separate.
still
One frame at the requested canvas; scene plates, up to about 1MP.
draft
Half canvas, turbo transformer, 8 steps; iteration and animatics.
draft_refine
Full canvas with an LTX-2.5 pass; previews and sharing, not photoreal delivery.
turbo
Full canvas, turbo transformer, 8 steps; useful for stylized or animated work.
full
Full canvas, base transformer, 20 steps; the delivery tier.
Variants
Variant controls the input condition, independently of the mode.
fl2va
First-and-last-frame conditioning with native video and audio output.
ref2va
Single reference-image conditioning with native video and audio output.
both
Loads both checkpoints so either conditioning path is available.
Summary — both tests, three renders each
Metric
Self-hosted (draft)
Self-hosted (full)
fal H3 Max
Test 1 — T2V, 10s cost
$0.0297
$0.286
$0.40 promo / $0.80 full
Test 2 — I2V, 5s cost
$0.0160
$0.047
$0.20 promo / $0.40 full
Test 1 — generation time
41.4s
398.6s
13s wall / 7.8s inference
Test 2 — generation time
22.3s
65.1s
5s wall / 1.5s inference
Output resolution
672×384 (T2V) / 448×576 (I2V)
1344×768 (T2V) / 768×864 (I2V)
1344×768 (T2V) / 768×864 (I2V)
Test 1 — Text-to-video, native audio, 10s
seed 42 · both platforms, identical prompt
Prompt: Realistic cinematic aerial establishing shot at golden hour: a small
songbird flies gracefully over the Eiffel Tower in Paris, sunlight glinting off the
iron lattice, shallow depth of field, photoreal film grain. [Push in] The bird
descends and swoops close to a young woman standing on a nearby rooftop terrace;
she smiles, looks up at the bird, and says warmly, “Hi bird!”
seed 42 · first frame from projects/jesus-knocks reference/characters/boy
Reference:boy-greeting-wave-up.jpg as first frame. Prompt: [Push in] The boy keeps waving, then a small bird flies down and lands
close beside him; he grins, looks up at the bird, and says warmly, “Hi bird!”
896×1152 → 448×576 closest valid portrait on draft's grid
Self-hosted (full)
768×864
Generation time
65.1s
Cost
$0.047
Canvas
768×864 full mode isn't grid-locked, matches source exactly
fal H3 Max (768P)
768×864
Generation time
5s
Cost, promo
$0.20 through Aug 31
Cost, full rate
$0.40 from Sep 1
Canvas
768×864 matches source image exactly
Draft mode's canvas grid is rigid — its no-duplication floor and its base-canvas
cap coincide exactly, leaving only nine valid canvases total, all sharing one pixel
budget. 896×1152 → 448×576 (ratio 0.78) is the closest of those nine to the source
image's 0.89, not an exact match. fal isn't grid-constrained the same way, so it
reproduces the source ratio exactly.
draft is the cheap iteration tier on the self-hosted side by design
(half-canvas, 8 steps) — fal has no equivalent cut-rate mode to compare against.
full (20 steps, full canvas) is self-hosted's actual delivery tier, and
the gap to fal narrows a lot there: 8.6× cheaper than fal's full rate at this
resolution instead of draft's 12.5×, at roughly 13× fal's generation time instead
of draft's 4.5×.