AI Video and Image Creator Amuse at an End, ComfyUI as Replacement

Those who generate images and videos with the AI tool Amuse might be surprised by the lack of updates. The project is apparently on hold but has been available as open source since December. ComfyUI offers an alternative.

The exact reasons are unknown, but the main developer behind Amuse has withdrawn. The originally used domain amuse.ai is now for sale. The source code is available under the Apache 2.0 license on GitHub. However, there are two external dependencies for which interested parties apparently have to purchase licenses. Development has thus effectively come to a standstill.

The current state can still be used. However, the capabilities of the available AI models are rapidly becoming outdated; current models, for example, provide more, more accurate, and more natural details. Amuse massively simplified the operation and also offered hardware acceleration on processors with sufficiently powerful GPUs or NPUs.

Alternative AI Tools

AMD is no longer advertising Amuse but is currently pushing ahead with better integration with AMD ROCm 7.1.1 in ComfyUI. For this, AMD recommends, for example, a Ryzen AI Max+ system with 128 GByte of memory or a Radeon AI Pro R9700 in conjunction with 64 GByte RAM “for an optimal experience”.

The alternative ComfyUI is available for download for Windows, macOS, or as a manual installation via GitHub – which also provides the greatest support for Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Apple Silicon, or Ascend. On the ComfyUI release website, there are also portable versions with optimizations for AMD or Nvidia that do not require installation.

The web interface of ComfyUI takes some getting used to for those switching over, but it can also be used easily after a short time. There are many more models to choose from than in Amuse, especially numerous video generators. However, there are also numerous models for sound generation and for creating AI images. The installation, for example in the portable version, is also unusual. If files for a model are missing, a dialog appears with buttons to download them. Before that, the dialog shows the directory where the file belongs under the “models” folder of the ComfyUI directory; the respective file simply needs to be saved there.

In the graph on the web interface, you can adjust the prompt and output size in the individual elements, for example, and then let the AI do its work. However, this is not possible with AMD Ryzen 7840HS/7640HS processors with their “fast” NPUs of around 10 TOPS, which was not a problem under Amuse. However, the processors were also not officially supported under Amuse. For the older processors, therefore, the only option is to use the older software with the outdated models if necessary.

(dmk)