[Fixed] RetroDiffusion does not work for RTX 5000/6000 GPUs


As of 5/31/2025, the RetroDiffusion extension for Aseprite does not work out of the box if you have an Nvidia RTX 5000 or RTX PRO 6000 series graphics card.
The issue is that RetroDiffusion creates a virtual environment and installs an outdated version of PyTorch that is not compatible with these newer GPUs.
Specifically, it installs:
safetensors==0.4.2
torch==2.3.0 -i https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu121 --trusted-host download.pytorch.org
torchvision==0.18.0 -i https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu121 --trusted-host download.pytorch.org
Here, cu121 refers to CUDA version 12.1, which does not support the RTX 5000 and RTX PRO 6000 series GPUs. You can check GPU compatibility on Nvidia's CUDA GPU Compute Capability page. If you try to run Retro Diffusion in Aseprite, you would get following error.
RuntimeError: CUDA error: no kernel image is available for execution on the device
To fix this, you'll first follow the normal RetroDiffusion setup process, then update the PyTorch/CUDA version via the terminal.
Steps
Make sure you have completed the initial setup for the RetroDiffusion extension.
Quit Aseprite.
Open Terminal.
Navigate to the
stable-diffusion-aseprite
folder.cd ~\AppData\Roaming\Aseprite\extensions\RetroDiffusion\stable-diffusion-aseprite
Check your CUDA version.
nvidia-smi
You should see something like
CUDA Version: 12.8
. Take note of this version. You'll use it in Step 7.Activate the virtual environment.
.\venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1
Check the installed version of PyTorch.
pip show torch
It will likely show something like
Version: 2.3.0+cu121
.Go to the official PyTorch install page and select your correct configuration (e.g., pip, Python, CUDA 12.8).
Copy and paste the
pip3 install
command from the website into your terminal. For CUDA 12.8, it should look like:pip3 install torch torchvision torchaudio --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu128
Verify the update.
pip show torch
It should now show something like
Version: 2.7.0+cu128
.Launch Aseprite and run RetroDiffusion to generate images. Done. Enjoy!
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