Does AI upscaling add detail that wasn't there?

Yes, and that is the honest description of it. The model predicts what the missing pixels most likely looked like based on millions of examples of real footage. It is plausible reconstruction, not recovery, which is why upscaled video should never be treated as evidence.

Is AI upscaling better than just exporting at a higher resolution?

Exporting at a higher resolution does nothing on its own — it stretches the same pixels over a larger grid. Traditional scaling (bicubic, Lanczos) interpolates between known pixels and cannot invent edge detail. An AI model can, because it has seen what real edges look like.

How much can you upscale before it looks fake?

2x is reliable on most footage. 4x works when the source is clean. Beyond that the model is inventing more than it is reconstructing, and faces are where people notice first.

Why Topaz ended perpetual licences (and what it costs now)

Quick answer

Topaz Labs stopped selling perpetual licences on 3 October 2025. Before that you could buy Gigapixel for $99, Photo AI for $199 and Video AI for $299, once. Today Topaz Video is $299 a year — the same number that used to buy it outright now rents it for twelve months.

What actually changed

Topaz Labs moved its whole line to subscription. The trade press reported it first: CG Channel, Topaz Labs to end perpetual licenses of its software, by Jim Thacker, published 30 September 2025. Its words: Topaz Labs is “discontinuing perpetual licenses of its software”, and “perpetual licenses of Gigapixel, Video AI and Photo AI available until 3 October”.

This was not announced in a Topaz press release we can point you at. The primary public source is that trade article plus the company’s own pricing page, which no longer offers a perpetual option. We would rather say that plainly than imply a statement that does not exist — if Topaz published one, we have not found it.

The prices that ended

From the same article: perpetual licences cost $99 for Gigapixel, $199 for Photo AI and $299 for Video AI. You bought the version line and kept it.

What replaced them

Read from topazlabs.com/pricing on 16 September 2026, from the page itself rather than a summary of it:

Topaz Video — $299/year, or $59/month month-to-month. Pro, for organisations over $1M revenue, $699/year.
Topaz Studio, the all-apps bundle — $399/year, or $69/month. Studio Pro $799/year.
Studio tiers include monthly cloud credits — 300 on Studio, 600 on Pro — and the page states that credits “expire at the end of each month and do not roll over”.

On that page today, the words perpetual, one-time and lifetime appear zero times. Checked 16 September 2026.

If you already own one

The change ran ahead of its own deadline. CG Channel noted on 30 September that Topaz Labs “has already removed perpetual licenses from its online store”, while a route to buy one remained open until 3 October — so the shop front changed before the date did, which is worth knowing if you remember checking the store and finding nothing.

What neither source tells us is what happens to a licence you already bought. That is the question most owners actually have — whether the app keeps working, and whether updates continue on the version line you paid for. The trade article does not address it and the current pricing page has no reason to. We are not going to answer it by inference from the word “perpetual”: if you hold one, ask Topaz directly, because a guess from us is worth nothing to you and we would rather leave a gap than fill it with something that sounds right.

The arithmetic worth doing

Video AI was $299 once. Topaz Video is $299 a year. A customer who bought the perpetual licence in, say, 2023 and would have kept using it has, from October 2025 onwards, a choice between staying on the version they own and paying annually to keep moving.

That is not a scandal — a company can change how it sells. It is simply a different deal from the one that existed, and it is the reason a lot of people are suddenly looking for something they can buy once.

Where Crisp sits

Crisp is $129, once, on up to 3 Macs at a time, for personal and commercial work. No subscription, no credits, no render minutes, no monthly cap and no per-export fee. It runs offline on your own machine, and it has a real timeline and an auto-montage, which the upscalers in this category generally do not.

It is also worth being straight about the other side: Topaz has a deeper model catalogue and far more control over individual artefacts than Crisp does. If that breadth is what you need, the subscription buys something real. If what you wanted was to own the tool, that option is no longer on their price list.

Sources: CG Channel, 30 September 2025, linked above; and topazlabs.com/pricing, read 16 September 2026. Prices move — we date every figure so you can tell how old it is.