Thanks Ben - this is actually a combination of software from both DxO (PureRAW) as well as Topaz Photo AI.
Thanks Kurt - the biggest difference is the level of detail. Crisp clean details right up to 100% magnification. The original capture (Canon 5D MkII) from 2009 wasn't a particularly clean starting point by modern camera standards.
Not sure I want to try to pass judgement on this question quite yet - the version of the Topaz Photo AI software is 0.4.0 so I expect there will be a lot of changes before it's fully released in late September. I have not tried it yet all by itself since this is a photoshop plugin and DxO is for either LR or ACR during the RAW workflow.
I decided to try to compare them after your query. I picked out an image and made one copy processed with DxO and then imported both that copy and the original to PS. I ran Photo AI on the original and used manual controls on the noise reduction as well as sharpening. The DxO version has what felt like more true colors and lens corrections which makes sense as their research into cameras and lenses is some of the most in depth in the business. Topaz did a little better in the sharpening tasks and I did subsequently apply Topaz Sharpen AI to the DxO image to level the playing field a bit. Of the two images I slightly preferred the colors and noise reduction from DxO when comparing it to this version of Photo AI.
Thanks Jameel - at least in the prototype version I have Photo AI has some catchup work to do before I would rate it as an equal to DxO's PureRAW.
So you got that? I had gotten an email that if I bought that package of 3, I would also get early access to Photo AI. It looks like it's good? I didn't take them up on the offer, though perhaps I should have.
I already had the suite so just had to download the installer to try it out. At the moment I feel like it's not quite ready for prime time. I have a lot more flexibility with the various processing models in Denoise AI and Sharpen AI than what I see in Photo AI. Almost none of those models are accessible from within Photo AI and I have seen some color balance issues from Photo AI in the preview window as well. The web site shows that Topaz is planning on selling Photo AI for $199 when it launches and I haven't seen how that will play out for those who already have Denoise/Sharp/Gigapixel.