the new-arrivals bench

exhibit twenty-two · thirteen painters, one small world. receipts included.

this is the new-arrivals bench — the sequel to the first diffusion bench, which asked what one pipeline could deliver; this one asks the opposite question: the open-weight image models arrived faster than anyone could look at them properly, so we sat thirteen of them down in front of one small world and had each paint it. the world is Sorrowmoor Cove, the fishing settlement our game RealKeep ships with — its regions, its faces, its foes, its dog. every painter gets the same prompt, the same seed, the same canvas; the only thing that changes is the painter.

what we pulled: the summer's open-weight field, seated side by side. from Black Forest Labs, FLUX.2 [klein] 4B (the only Apache FLUX) and the klein 9B edit variant, plus the 32B FLUX.2 [dev] at its full fp8 pair; from Alibaba, Z-Image base beside the Z-Image Turbo we already ran; HiDream-O1-Dev (MIT, pixel-native); Krea 2 Turbo, the summer's community workhorse; Chroma1-HD, the stylized FLUX-class independent; Microsoft's Mage-Flow Turbo (MIT, the fastest credible sketch engine); Baidu's ERNIE-Image-Turbo; and Kandinsky 5.0 Lite — beside our three incumbents: AlbedoBase XL (the game's live painter), FLUX.1 [dev] and Z-Image Turbo. every licence was read first-hand before anything rendered — bar one incumbent whose text we have never been able to find, and honesty about that costs it its pictures here. a held painter is not a gap in a table: its pictures are absent from every gallery below, and every one of its renders is counted, painter by painter, in the census that follows — both kinds of held, the licences that refuse republication and the one nobody has read. the internal copy of this bench is the one place every picture exists.

5036 renders in this bench · 3480 published here · 1556 held (licence)

painter	published	held	total
hidream-o1-dev-fp8	457	—	457
flux2-klein-4b-bf16	453	—	453
krea2-turbo-fp8	453	—	453
flux2-dev-fp8	0	445 refused	445
z-image-turbo-bf16	423	—	423
flux1-dev-bf16	0	379 refused	379
kandinsky5-lite-bf16	379	—	379
albedobase-xl-fp16	0	375 unverified	375
mage-flow-turbo-int8	369	—	369
chroma1-hd-fp8	361	—	361
z-image-base-bf16	361	—	361
flux2-klein-9b-kv-fp8	0	357 refused	357
ernie-image-turbo-bf16	224	—	224

held renders exist and were measured; only their pictures stay home.

each gallery below is one subject under every painter, and every image carries its checkpoint, sampler, steps, canvas, seed and render-seconds, measured by the render queue's own clock; every one opens its own specimen sheet. where a painter's licence lets us run the weights but not republish the outputs, that painter has no column here at all — its renders are counted in the census above, render for render, and its pictures stay in the internal copy of this bench. if a claim has no receipt, it is not published here.

the bench also asks two questions of itself — the colour question (our own house style, it turns out, was flattening every subject onto one amber palette; measured, not vibes) and the ladders (what steps, pixels and seeds actually buy). the first bench's licence ledger carries every painter's licence we could read, first-hand and dated — the one incumbent whose licence text has never been found carries only a permission-flags read there, a creator's tick-box rather than a document, which is exactly why it has no pictures here. hardware is named by vram class, not model. nothing here was re-rolled to look better; the first draw you see is the first draw we got.

ADDED 2026-08-24 (UTC), after this bench's release earlier the same day: the limner's own ladder, a new group below, sitting with this bench's other ladders. it is six of the live game's REAL sketch prompts — the strings our world actually submits when it paints a foe, a place or a face mid-play — rendered at 768² and at 4 · 8 · 12 · 16 · 20 · 32 steps by the three painters whose licences allow us to show the pictures. the painter the game ships today climbed the same ladder twice, at 768² and at its live 512² tier, and is counted here without a single picture published, exactly as it is everywhere else on this bench. rendered on keel 2026-08-24. it adds 108 published renders and 72 counted drops to the 3372 published and 1484 held this bench released with — so the census above is already the new reading, not the released one.

every render in this bench was painted on keel, the 96G VRAM workstation — provably: the bench harness renders only through keel's own queue, and every receipt's render-seconds are that queue's own execution timestamps.

built 2026-08-24 (UTC) · updated 2026-08-24 (UTC) · a strata→signal research bench · corrections welcome: hello@strata2signal.com

the worlds, painter by painter

one painter walking all ten art directions — the cove beside the nine site worlds; the easel sampler

licence-held

albedobase-xl-fp16 walks the nine worlds

held — its licence text has never been found, so nothing of it is published

30 renders recorded · counted in the census above · no pictures published

licence-held

flux2-dev-fp8 walks the nine worlds

held — its licence refuses republication of the pictures

30 renders recorded · counted in the census above · no pictures published

the worlds, world by world

one art direction, every painter that can hold it

elsewhere in the workshop