Material Maker, using Tile 2x2s to create varied tiles

Why are Tile 2x2’s used even though the input is the same image?

So that warping operators can be used to create variations of the same object.

Here the tile node is used to create a larger image but the FBM and Warp nodes are used to create variations across each one of the objects. Then the tiling operator is able to pick one of the four subtle variations in addition to applying its own minor transformations when placing images.