The UVW Transform texture takes an input texture and applies a map to transform the input texture’s UV layout on top of the input texture’s own UV coordinate transformation. This concept becomes more useful when used in conjunction with other mapping textures to combine different scales/orientations/translations of that same texture to create a larger detail range.
In figure 1, the Compare node used for the condition of the 2 same image texture and the UVW Transform node is applied to one of them to add detail. The Compare node does not have to be used like the example in figure 1. Any node can be used such as Mix, Cosine Mix, Add, Multiply or Subtract.
Figure 1: The UVW Transform node is used to position the same texture map but with a different set of UV coordinate values.