Qwen’s Image 2.1 released but it come with lots of improvements but just as many caveats.
The old Qwen-Image-2512 was a 20B model with a massive:
💾 40.9GB BF16 image transformer
But the new Qwen-Image-2.1 comes with …
🧠 7B visual generator
💾 14.2GB BF16
🔥 7.26GB INT8 already available for ComfyUI 👈👀 (Day-1)
This little thing can …
🎨 generate AND edit images
🖼️ generate native 2K
🫥 create real transparent RGBA images
👥 use up to 10 reference images
✏️ preserve people/products while editing
🔤 render text
🎯 do masked/local edits
Qwen basically took the huge local image model and reduced with a catch …
⚠️ The tiny 7.26GB image model comes with an entire pipeline.
It uses a Qwen3-VL 8B encoder + VAE.
ComfyUI already has a 6.31GB W4A8 encoder, and Qwen supports CPU offloading for smaller GPUs.
Also…
🚫 Qwen-Image-2.1 is NON-COMMERCIAL under the new Qwen Research License.
That’s especially notable because Qwen-Image-2512 was Apache 2.0.