VAE Decode Tiled Pipe

Decoding is the step that surprises people: a 2K or 4K latent can blow up VRAM on the way back to pixels, long after the sampler itself behaved. VAE Decode Tiled Pipe is the tiled version of the decode - latent in, image out, tile by tile - with the VAE passed through so the whole VAE line stays on one wire, in the style of the early braintacles pipe nodes.

How it works

It calls ComfyUI's vae.decode_tiled with tile dimensions of tile_size ÷ 8 (latent space is 8× smaller than pixel space, so a 1024 tile means 128×128 latent tiles). Inputs: samples (LATENT), vae (VAE), tile_size (default 1024, range 320–4096 in steps of 64). Outputs: IMAGE, VAE. The VAE output is a pass-through - leave it dangling or wire it on to the next decode.

Where people get burned

Two things, both worth knowing before you lean on tiling. First, the speed/VRAM trade is steep: tiled decode is far slower than a single pass, but it's the standard escape hatch when a full decode won't fit - community reports put tiled memory use under a third of the full pass on the same hardware. Second, tiled decode can leave faint seams at tile boundaries. If you see a subtle grid pattern, raise tile_size as high as your VRAM allows instead of chasing it at 320.

The honest problem

Like the other pipe nodes, this one isn't in the current pack. It shipped in the early braintacles releases and was removed in May 2024 when the pack shrank to five nodes; the version in GitHub and ComfyUI Manager doesn't include it. Missing-node error on load? That's why.

Recreate it today with the core VAE Decode (tiled) node plus a second VAE wire to wherever you need it - same behavior, one extra line. Or pin the pack to the last release that had the pipes:

git clone https://github.com/braintacles/braintacles-comfyui-nodes
cd braintacles-comfyui-nodes
git checkout 26732fd

If it's just the missing-node error you're solving, switch to core tiled decode and move on. The pipe is a nice-to-have; the tiling is the actual feature, and you don't need this pack to get it.