Someone made a new VAE for sdxl. It's less noisy, but you have to finetune or train a lora with it to get the benefits.
https://huggingface.co/Anzhc/MS-LC-EQ-D-VR_VAE
Top right - new vae + lora trained with it
Bottom left - old vae
it looks sharper than old vae, so it works?