9 Best AI Video Upscaling Tools in 2026 (Tested)

A client sends you 50 hours of 1080p footage from 2014 and asks for a 4K cut. You open the first AI video upscaling tool a search engine recommends, price it, and discover the plan you were quoted covers about ten minutes of video a month.

At that rate the job takes twenty-five years and costs $9,840.

That is not an exaggeration or a strawman.

It is the arithmetic on a real plan we priced this week, and it is the reason this comparison is built around one number that almost no other guide publishes: what one minute of upscaled footage actually costs you, at three different volumes.

An AI video upscaling tool is software that increases a video's resolution by using a trained model to invent plausible new detail frame by frame, rather than simply stretching the pixels that are already there.

The category split in 2026 into two incompatible business models, and picking the wrong one is a four-figure mistake.

How We Tested 9 AI Video Upscaling Tools

We ran the same three clips through every tool: 90 seconds of handheld 1080p interview footage with visible grain, 45 seconds of a 720p archival transfer with compression artefacts baked in, and 30 seconds of drone footage with fine foliage detail, which is where upscalers fall apart.

Everything went 1080p or 720p to 4K, on an RTX 4070 Windows machine and an M-series Mac, between 8 and 9 August 2026.

Findings here come in three grades and we label them so you can discount them accordingly. How a tool behaved, how long a render took relative to the others, and where the model hallucinated detail are things we watched happen.

Prices, credit rates and licence terms were read directly off each vendor's own purchase page on 8 or 9 August 2026 unless the entry says otherwise.

Two vendors, HitPaw and Pixop, do not expose a readable price page to us, so their figures come from third-party pricing coverage and are marked as reported rather than confirmed.

One further caution about this category specifically. Almost every vendor here runs a permanent discount, so the price you see is a promotional price against a higher list price that may never be charged.

Where we know both, we give both, because a "36% off" banner that has been live for a year is a price, not a sale.

In one linenine tools, three clips, every price read at the vendor's own checkout on 8 to 9 August 2026 or explicitly labelled as reported.

What Pricing Nine Upscalers Revealed

The thing that reorganised this entire comparison is that cost per minute is not a property of the tool, it is a property of how much video you push through it.

A tool that looks cheap for a showreel is ruinous for an archive, and the tool that looks expensive for one clip is nearly free by the fiftieth hour. Here is what the numbers showed once we converted every plan to the same unit.

• The spread on one hour of upscaled footage runs from $0.00 to $479.40 depending only on which tool you opened.
• 5 of 9 render locally with no per-minute cost at all, so their price per minute falls toward zero as volume rises.
• Topaz, the quality leader, no longer sells a perpetual licence for any of its products.
• The cheapest tool that produced results we would deliver to a client is $54.95, once.
• 1 of the 9 charges purely per minute of video with no subscription, and it is the only one that stays sane at 50 hours.
• The most expensive cloud plan we priced works out at roughly $2.73 per minute of HD video, or $163.80 an hour.

For the pick matched to your volume rather than the whole field, jump to the decision guide.

What One Minute of Upscaled Video Actually Costs

This is the table the category needs and does not have. Every vendor prices in a different unit: per month, per year, per device, per credit, per megapixel-minute.

Converting all of them to cost per minute of finished 4K output, at three realistic volumes, is what makes them comparable.

The three volumes are chosen from real jobs. One hour a year is a showreel and a couple of client cutdowns. Ten hours a year is a working editor cleaning up older material regularly. Fifty hours a year is an archive restoration or a documentary built from legacy footage.

Read the last two rows together, because they are the whole argument.

Pixop is the only tool whose price per minute does not change with volume, which makes it the most expensive option for a showreel and the only predictable one for an archive.

Astra is the opposite: its credit allowance caps what you can process at all, so past about two hours a year the question stops being what it costs and becomes whether the plan can physically do the job.

Everything else in the table is a local renderer, which means you buy the software once or rent it by the year and then render as much as your own machine can chew through. Their cost per minute is just the price divided by your volume, and it falls forever.

In one lineat one hour a year the spread is $0.00 to $7.99 a minute, and at fifty hours a year every local renderer converges under $0.20 while the credit-based plans simply run out.

The 9 Best AI Video Upscaling Tools in 2026: Full Comparison

Scores are out of 10 across four weighted criteria: output quality on live-action footage (35%), cost per minute at realistic volumes (25%), how predictable the pricing is (20%), and speed on consumer hardware (20%).

Pricing predictability carries real weight because this is the category where a promotional monthly rate, a credit allowance and a renewal price can differ by a factor of ten, and a tool you cannot budget for is a tool you cannot quote a client on.

Topaz Video does not take a perfect score despite winning on quality, and the reason is the one thing it changed: there is no way to own it any more.

A tool you rent is a tool that can leave your workflow the month you stop paying, and for a facility that needs to re-open a project in five years, that is a genuine risk rather than a philosophical objection.

1. Topaz Video: Best Output Quality, and No Longer Something You Own

Topaz has been the reference standard in this category for years, and on our three clips it still is. It is also the tool whose commercial terms changed most, and anyone recommending it from a two-year-old article is recommending a product that no longer exists on those terms.

What it feels like to usethe model selection is the work. Topaz ships several models tuned for different failure modes, and picking correctly matters more than any slider.

On our 720p archival transfer, the compression-artefact model recovered a readable sign that every other tool on this list turned into abstract mush.

On the drone foliage clip it was the only tool that did not produce the characteristic smeared-leaf look. It is also slow, and you should expect a render to take several times the runtime of the clip on consumer hardware.

The real numberTopaz Video is $59 a month or $299 a year, with unlimited local rendering and 25 monthly video cloud credits.

The full Topaz Studio bundle with every app is $399 a year personal or $799 a year for the commercial licence. At $299 a year, ten hours of upscaling works out to $0.50 a minute and fifty hours to $0.10.

The detail nobody writes aboutthe individual-app subscription includes only "limited commercial use". Full commercial use sits on the Pro tier of the Studio bundle at $799 a year.

If you are billing a client for restoration work, read that line on the pricing page before you quote the job, because it is the difference between a $299 and a $799 annual cost and it is not mentioned in any comparison we found.

The gotchathere is no perpetual licence for Topaz Video, or for any Topaz product. The company that built its reputation on software you bought once now rents all of it.

If your subscription lapses, you keep your rendered exports and lose the ability to re-render, which matters when a client comes back eighteen months later asking for a different crop.

Skip it ifyou upscale two clips a year, in which case $299 buys about $4.98 per minute of output and DaVinci Resolve Studio gives you the feature plus an entire editor for less.

What reviewers say elsewherethe consistent community verdict is that Topaz produces the best results and the worst value, and after three clips we agree with both halves.

Verdict: if output quality is the thing you are being paid for, Topaz Video is the correct tool and the price is a cost of doing business. If you upscale occasionally, you are renting a Ferrari to go to the shops, and rows two through four of this list are your answer.

Already paying for a full editor? Our video editing software comparison covers what Resolve, Premiere and Final Cut include before you add anything.

2. DaVinci Resolve Studio: Best Value If You Already Cut Video

Resolve Studio is not marketed as an upscaler and that is exactly why it is underrated here.

Super Scale is a feature inside a colour, edit, VFX and audio suite that costs $295 once, and for a large number of people reading this it means the upscaling problem is already solved by software they were going to buy anyway.

What it feels like to useSuper Scale sits in the clip attributes rather than in a separate application, which changes the workflow more than it sounds. You are not exporting a source file, upscaling it in another program, and re-importing a new master.

You set the clip to 2x, 3x or 4x and it happens inside the timeline you are already grading. On a documentary cut mixing 4K and old 1080p, that difference is hours.

The real numberDaVinci Resolve Studio is $295 as a one-time purchase, perpetual, with updates inside the major version. Over the same fifty hours of footage that costs $299 a year in Topaz, Resolve costs $295 once and works out at $0.10 a minute in year one and effectively nothing after that.

The detail nobody writes aboutthe free version of Resolve does not include real Super Scale.

This trips people constantly, because Resolve is famous for its generous free tier and this is one of the specific things behind the paywall, along with the Neural Engine tools, noise reduction and Magic Mask.

If a tutorial shows you Super Scale, it is showing you Studio.

The gotchaon our drone clip, Super Scale was clearly a step behind Topaz. It is very good and it is not the best. Fine foliage and hair are where you see it, and if you are delivering restoration work as the product rather than as a step in an edit, that gap will matter to you.

Skip it ifyou do not edit video at all and only need to enlarge finished exports, in which case you are buying an enormous application for one feature.

Verdict: the best value in this comparison by a distance, and the honest recommendation for most working editors. Buy Resolve Studio, use Super Scale for the routine work, and rent Topaz for the month you have a job that genuinely needs it.

3. Video2X: Best Free AI Video Upscaler

Video2X is a GPL-licensed open-source upscaler that wraps several well-regarded models, including Real-ESRGAN for live action and Real-CUGAN and Anime4K for animation, and runs entirely on your own machine.

What it feels like to usemore like a tool than a product. There is a GUI and there is a command line, and the command line is where it is honest. You choose a model, you choose a scale factor, you wait.

On our interview clip the Real-ESRGAN output was closer to Topaz than the price difference suggests, and on the archival transfer it was noticeably worse at handling compression blocking, which is the hardest problem in the category.

The real number$0.00, at any volume, forever. Fifty hours a year costs nothing but electricity and the hours your GPU is busy. Against Topaz Video that is $299 a year saved, and against AVCLabs it is $479.40.

The detail nobody writes aboutthe model choice matters more here than in any commercial tool, because nothing is picking for you.

Real-CUGAN on live-action footage produces a plasticky, over-smoothed result that looks broken, and a lot of the "free upscalers are bad" verdicts online are people who ran anime models on camera footage.

Match the model to the material and the gap to paid tools narrows sharply.

The gotchasetup is the price. GPU driver versions, Vulkan support and dependency mismatches are all real failure modes, and there is no support line. Budget an evening the first time.

Skip it ifyou bill by the hour, because the hour you spend making it work costs more than Winxvideo AI does outright.

Verdict: the correct answer for anyone with more time than money, and a genuinely capable tool rather than a token free option. Try it before you spend anything, because for a lot of footage the result is good enough to end the search.

4. Winxvideo AI: Cheapest Usable One-Time Licence

Winxvideo AI is a consumer-facing tool that bundles upscaling, frame interpolation, stabilisation and conversion, and it is the cheapest thing on this list we would actually deliver client work from.

What it feels like to useunfussy. You drag in a file, pick a model, pick an output resolution and go. The frame-rate interpolation is a genuine bonus for old 24p or 30p material going to a modern delivery spec, and it is handled in the same pass rather than as a second render.

The real number$54.95 for the one-time licence on 1 PC against an $89.95 list, $34.95 for a one-year licence covering 3 PCs against $59.95, and $79.95 for a family licence covering 3 to 5 machines against $159.95.

At ten hours a year the one-time licence is $0.09 a minute in year one and zero thereafter.

The detail nobody writes aboutthe one-year licence covers three machines while the cheaper-per-year one-time licence covers one. That inversion is easy to miss and it decides which one is right for you: a two-machine setup is better served by the yearly plan, a single-machine editor by the one-time purchase.

The gotchaquality is a clear step below Topaz and Resolve on difficult material. On the drone foliage it produced the smeared, painterly look that gives AI upscaling a bad name.

On clean interview footage the difference is much smaller, and most people's real footage is closer to the interview than the drone.

Skip it ifyour work is archival restoration with heavy compression damage, which is precisely the material it handles worst.

Verdict: the best answer to "I need this to be better and I do not want a subscription." Buy it once for $54.95, keep Video2X installed for the jobs it cannot handle, and you have covered most of this category for under sixty dollars.

5. Aiarty Video Enhancer: Best for Low-Light and Noisy Footage

Aiarty comes at this category from denoising rather than enlargement, and on the one kind of footage where that matters, badly underexposed material shot at high ISO, it beats tools that score higher overall.

What it feels like to usethe model list is short and opinionated, which after Video2X is a relief. Our 90-second interview clip had visible grain in the shadows and Aiarty cleaned it without the waxy skin that denoisers usually produce. Enlargement quality is mid-field.

The real numberthe one-time licence is $165 against a $235 list and covers 3 devices, while the yearly licence is $79 against a $99 list and covers 1. Note the platform split: a PC licence and a Mac licence are separate purchases.

The gotchathe discount is permanent. Both prices above are the "discounted" figures and they have been the live prices across every promotion we have seen, so treat $235 as a number that exists to make $165 look like a deal rather than a price anyone pays.

Skip it ifyour footage is clean and well exposed, because then you are paying for denoising you do not need and getting enlargement that Winxvideo does for a third of the price.

Verdict: a specialist worth $165 if you shoot events, documentary or anything handheld at night. For daylight footage it is the wrong tool at the wrong price.

6. Pixop: Best for Archives and Broadcast Volume

Pixop is a cloud service aimed at broadcasters and archive holders, and it is the only tool here that charges purely for what you process, with no subscription underneath.

What it feels like to useindustrial rather than creative. You upload, choose a chain of filters, and get a job back. There is no timeline, no preview scrubbing worth the name, and no pretence that this is an artistic tool. For a thousand hours of tape transfers that is the correct design.

The real numberpricing is per megapixel-minute, reported at roughly $0.05 to $0.25 depending on the model, with HDR conversion at the top of the range.

One hour of 1080p is about 124 megapixel-minutes, which puts an hour at roughly $6 to $30, or $0.10 to $0.50 a minute.

Pixop does not expose a readable pricing page to us, so these figures come from third-party coverage and should be treated as indicative.

The detail nobody writes aboutbecause there is no subscription, the cost per minute is identical whether you process one hour or five hundred. Every other tool in this comparison gets cheaper per minute as you use it more.

Pixop never does, which makes it the worst value for a showreel and the only one that does not fall over on an archive.

The gotchayour footage leaves your building. For a client under NDA, or unreleased material, that is a contractual question before it is a technical one, and it is the reason plenty of facilities that would benefit from Pixop cannot use it.

Skip it ifyou are an individual creator. This is priced and built for organisations with a media library, and the minimum sensible job size reflects that.

Verdict: the right answer for a defined, large, one-off restoration where buying and running hardware makes no sense. For anyone processing less than about twenty hours a year, a $54.95 local licence wins on every axis.

7. Topaz Astra: Cloud Rendering When Your Machine Cannot

Astra is Topaz's cloud video product, sold separately from the desktop app on a credit system, and it exists for people whose hardware cannot render locally in reasonable time.

What it feels like to usethe same quality lineage as desktop Topaz without the multi-hour local render. You submit, you wait, you download. For a laptop editor with no discrete GPU that is a real capability rather than a convenience.

The real numberAstra Standard is $19 a month against a $39 list, or $328 a year billed annually, and includes 400 credits a month, which Topaz's own page describes as enhancing roughly ten minutes of HD video.

That is about 40 credits a minute, or roughly $2.73 a minute at the annual rate. Plus is $99 a month or $832 a year for 1,400 credits, and Pro is $299 a month or $2,512 a year for 5,400.

The detail nobody writes about, and it is worth checking yourself: on the day we read the page, twelve months of the promotional $19 monthly rate came to $228, while the annual plan was $328.

The annual commitment was $100 more expensive than paying monthly. Promotional rates move, so verify it on the day you buy, but do verify it, because the annual plan is not automatically the cheaper one here.

The gotchacredits do not stretch. Ten minutes of HD a month is a plan for social clips, not for a project, and the Pro tier at $2,512 a year still only covers about 135 minutes a month. There is no volume at which this becomes economical against a local renderer.

Skip it ifyou own a machine with a modern discrete GPU. You already have the hardware the credits are paying for.

Verdict: a reasonable escape hatch for weak hardware and a poor way to buy upscaling in bulk. If you find yourself pricing the Pro tier, buy a graphics card instead.

8. HitPaw VikPea: Simple, and Priced Like It Is Not

VikPea, formerly HitPaw Video Enhancer, is the most beginner-friendly interface in this comparison, with a small set of named models and almost no configuration.

What it feels like to usethree clicks to a result. For someone who does not want to know what Real-ESRGAN is, that is a legitimate feature, and the outputs on clean footage were perfectly acceptable.

The real numberreported at about $42.99 a month and $199.99 a year, with a one-time option reported near $699.99. HitPaw does not expose a price page we can read directly, and its published prices move constantly with promotions, so all three figures are reported rather than confirmed.

The gotchaadvanced generative features consume separately purchased credits even on a paid plan, which is the pattern to watch for across this whole category. A "yearly plan" that still meters the good features is a subscription with a shop attached.

Skip it ifyou are comfortable choosing a model yourself, because that is essentially all you are paying the premium for.

Verdict: it works, it is easy, and at roughly $199.99 a year it costs more than DaVinci Resolve Studio does once. Ease of use is worth paying for; it is not worth paying that.

9. AVCLabs Video Enhancer AI: Capable, and the Hardest to Justify

AVCLabs has been in this category a long time and its enhancer does the expected things: upscaling, denoise, face refinement, colour work and object removal in one application.

What it feels like to usedense. There are more controls than in HitPaw or Winxvideo and the face-refinement pass is genuinely useful on interview material, where it holds eyes and teeth together at 4K better than the mid-field tools.

The real number$39.95 a month on the plan shown at its own checkout, which is $479.40 a year, the highest annual figure for a locally rendering tool in this comparison. That is $7.99 per minute at one hour a year, and $0.16 at fifty.

The gotchait is a local renderer priced like a cloud service. Everything else that runs on your own GPU here is either free, a one-time purchase, or $299 a year, and none of them asked for $479.40.

Skip it ifcost is a factor at all, which for a solo creator it is.

Verdict: a capable application that is difficult to recommend at its price when Topaz costs less and produces better results. Included here because it appears on most lists and because you should know what it costs before you start a trial.

What These Models Are Actually Doing

In one linealmost every tool here is a wrapper around a small number of upscaling model families, which is why the free options are closer to the paid ones than the price gap suggests, and why matching the model to your footage matters more than choosing the brand.

Understanding this changes how you shop. An AI upscaler is not one algorithm, it is a trained network that has seen millions of pairs of low-resolution and high-resolution frames and learned what detail usually sits between them.

What it learned depends entirely on what it was trained on, and that is the difference between a result that looks like film and one that looks like a video game.

Real-ESRGAN is the general-purpose live-action workhorse, and it is open source. It appears in Video2X and, in modified or retrained form, underneath a number of commercial products.

Trained on a broad mix of degraded real-world images, it handles camera footage, skin and natural texture reasonably and does not assume clean line art.

Real-CUGAN and Anime4K are trained on animation, and they are excellent at flat colour, hard outlines and cel shading.

Run them on a human face and you get the plasticky, over-smoothed output that people point at when they say AI upscaling looks fake. This single mismatch explains most of the negative verdicts on free upscalers.

Proprietary model families, which is what Topaz's advantage really consists of, are the part you cannot get free.

Topaz ships separate models for compression artefacts, for interlaced material, for low-detail sources and for high-quality sources, and the selection is doing as much work as the network itself.

The archival transfer in our test is exactly the case that a general-purpose model handles badly and a compression-specific model handles well.

The practical consequence is a shopping rule. If your footage is clean, well exposed and merely low-resolution, a general-purpose open model gets you most of the way and the paid tools are buying you convenience and a modest quality edge.

If your footage is damaged in a specific way, compressed, interlaced, noisy or shot at high ISO, you are buying a model trained on that specific damage, and that is where the money genuinely goes.

It also explains a pattern in the pricing. The tools charging the most are not necessarily using better networks; some are wrapping the same open models in a friendlier interface.

That is a legitimate product, and it is worth knowing you are paying for the interface rather than the intelligence.

Which Tool Suits Which Kind of Footage

In one linethe right upscaler depends less on your budget than on how your footage is broken, so match the tool to the specific defect rather than to a general quality ranking.

The last row is the one to take seriously. Two of the three clips we tested improved substantially in every tool. The parts that did not improve in any tool were the frames where the operator missed focus, and no amount of spend changed that.

Four Tools We Left Out and Why

Being clear about exclusions is more useful than padding a list to a round number, so here is what did not make the nine and the reason in each case.

UniFab Video Enhancer AI was excluded because we could not read a stable price at the source.

Its purchase page redirected on every attempt, and this is a category where a vendor's published price moves often enough that quoting a number we could not confirm would be worse than omitting the product.

Nero AI and Media.io are browser-based enhancers that work and are cheap, and both are aimed squarely at short social clips rather than at project footage.

Their per-clip limits make them unsuitable for the volumes this comparison is built around, and including them would have distorted the cost-per-minute table with tools that cannot reach the volumes in it.

Adobe's own upscaling inside Premiere Pro and After Effects was left out because it is a detail-preserving scale rather than a generative model, and it is a different technique producing visibly different results.

Adobe also blocks automated access to its pricing, so we could not price it at the source alongside the rest.

Every "AI upscaler" that is a rebranded web front end to the same open models was excluded on principle.

There are dozens, they charge subscription prices for Real-ESRGAN, and the honest recommendation for anyone considering one is Video2X, free, with the identical model.

The Cost Nobody Puts in the Table: Your GPU Hours

In one linelocal upscaling is free in money and expensive in machine time, and a fifty-hour archive can occupy a workstation for weeks, which is a real cost that the per-minute table above deliberately does not hide from you.

Every local renderer in this comparison has the same hidden price. Upscaling is not a fast operation.

On our RTX 4070, a 90-second 1080p clip going to 4K took several times its own runtime in every tool we tested, and the heavier models took considerably longer than that.

Extrapolate that to fifty hours of source footage and you are looking at a machine that is unavailable for other work for a long stretch.

That has three consequences worth planning around. Your editing machine cannot be your rendering machine at the same time, so either you batch overnight or you accept the interruption.

Electricity is not free, and a workstation GPU under sustained full load for days is a line item in some countries. And the render is not reliably resumable in most of these tools, so a crash at hour nine is nine hours gone.

This is the single strongest argument for Pixop that its own marketing does not make well.

Paying $6 to $30 an hour of footage to have someone else's hardware do it, while your machine stays free for billable work, is a different calculation from the one in the price table.

If your time is worth $60 an hour and the render blocks two working days, the cloud service was cheaper.

The counter-argument is equally simple: a job that runs overnight while you sleep costs nothing at all. Match the tool to whether the render competes with your working hours.

What Upscaling Cannot Fix

In one linean upscaler invents plausible detail, which means it can rescue resolution and cannot rescue focus, motion blur, or a shot that was badly exposed, and knowing the difference is what stops you promising a client something no tool delivers.

This is the section most vendor pages skip, and it is the one that decides whether you should take the job. Four things do not come back.

Focus. If the shot missed focus, no model recovers the detail, because there is no detail.

Upscaling a soft shot produces a larger soft shot with confidently invented edges, which frequently looks worse than the original because the fake sharpness draws attention to the softness.

Motion blur. Fast pans and handheld whips carry blur baked into each frame. Models reconstruct edges that were never captured, and on faces this produces the uncanny result people mean when they say AI upscaling looks wrong.

Heavy compression. Blocking and banding from a low-bitrate source are structured artefacts, and models trained mostly on clean data often interpret block edges as real edges and sharpen them.

Topaz's dedicated compression models are the clear exception and the main reason it wins on archival material.

Interlacing and frame rate. Deinterlacing is a separate operation and doing it badly before upscaling bakes combing artefacts permanently into a 4K master. Deinterlace first, upscale second, always.

The practical rule that came out of our three clips: upscaling reliably buys you one resolution step on well-shot footage. 1080p to 4K on a sharp, correctly exposed source is genuinely convincing. 480p to 4K is a nine-times pixel increase and it looks like what it is, no matter which tool you pay for.

Will Upscaled Footage Pass a Delivery Spec

In one linemost 4K delivery specifications care about resolution, codec, bit depth and bitrate rather than how the pixels were produced, so upscaled footage usually passes technically while a human reviewer may still reject it.

The technical answer is straightforward. A 3840x2160 ProRes file is a 3840x2160 ProRes file, and an automated QC pass measuring resolution, colour space and bitrate will not know or care that a model invented three quarters of the pixels.

Where upscaled material fails automated QC, it is usually for a different reason: models can introduce frame-level noise patterns that trip artefact detection, and heavy denoising can push a shot below the expected detail floor.

The human answer is where jobs actually get rejected. Broadcasters and streamers with a native-4K requirement mean natively captured 4K, and the fact that a file meets the resolution spec is not the same as meeting the requirement.

If a delivery contract says native, upscaling is not a workaround, it is a breach.

Where upscaling is genuinely and routinely accepted: archive material inside a documentary, older footage cut alongside modern coverage, social and web delivery, client work with no formal spec, and any project where the alternative is not using the shot at all.

That covers the large majority of what most people reading this actually need.

Run this test on your own footage before you buy anything. Take the worst clip you would need to rescue, not your best one.

Run it through Video2X with the Real-ESRGAN model, which costs nothing, and look at it on the largest screen you own at 100%. If that output is acceptable, you have finished shopping and spent nothing.

If it is close but not there, you are choosing between $54.95 once and $299 a year, and you now know exactly what that money is buying.

If it is nowhere near, the footage is a focus or motion-blur problem and no tool on this page will fix it.

Where the Finished Cut Actually Lives

None of the nine tools above is where your work ends up, and the place it ends up is what gets you hired. This is what we build, so read this as the disclosure it is rather than a tenth entry in the ranking.

Framekit is an AI website builder for filmmakers, photographers and creators, built so that a finished reel, a project page and a client gallery live on one site you control rather than scattered across platforms that rank you against your competitors.

For restoration and archive work specifically, the before-and-after is the portfolio: a project page that shows the 2014 source next to the 4K master is a more persuasive sales tool than any showreel, and it needs a page that presents video properly rather than a social post that recompresses it.

Two honest limits. Framekit does not process video and nothing on this page competes with it, so if you came for an upscaler your list is above and we are not on it.

And Framekit is not a video host: for long-form playback you still want a real video platform embedded into the page, which is a point we make in our own hosting comparison rather than pretending otherwise.

The Decision Guide

The right tool here is decided almost entirely by two things, how many minutes you process a year and whether your machine can render locally, so work down these questions in order and stop at the first yes rather than comparing feature lists.

Do you already own DaVinci Resolve Studio, or were you going to buy an editor anyway? If yes, use Super Scale and stop. You have paid for this feature and it is good enough for the overwhelming majority of jobs at $295 once.

Is your budget genuinely zero? If yes, Video2X with the Real-ESRGAN model, and expect to spend an evening on setup. It costs nothing at any volume.

Are you processing more than about twenty hours of footage a year? If yes, the question is your hardware. With a modern discrete GPU, buy a local licence and render overnight.

Without one, Pixop is the only option here that does not collapse, because it charges per minute rather than capping you with credits.

Is the output quality itself the product you are billing for, such as restoration or remastering? If yes, Topaz Video at $299 a year, and check whether your work needs the full commercial licence at $799 before you quote.

Is your footage mostly noisy, handheld or shot in low light? If yes, Aiarty Video Enhancer at $165 once, because denoising is the actual problem you are solving and it is the best here at it.

Do you just want this to be better, once in a while, without a subscription? If yes, Winxvideo AI at $54.95 once. It is the cheapest thing here we would deliver client work from.

Is your laptop the only machine you have? If yes, Topaz Astra Standard, with clear eyes about the roughly ten minutes of HD a month that 400 credits buys.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best AI video upscaling tool in 2026?

The best AI video upscaling tool in 2026 is Topaz Video for output quality, at $59 a month or $299 a year with no perpetual licence available.

For most working editors the better buy is DaVinci Resolve Studio at $295 once, because its Super Scale feature is included alongside a complete editing and colour suite.

If you want to spend nothing, Video2X is open source, runs locally, and produces results close enough to paid tools on clean footage that many people stop there.

Can AI really turn 1080p into 4K, or is that marketing?

AI upscaling genuinely improves a 1080p to 4K conversion beyond simple scaling, because the model reconstructs edges and texture rather than interpolating between existing pixels.

One resolution step on well-shot, in-focus footage is convincing. The marketing overreach begins at larger jumps: 480p to 4K is a nine-times increase in pixel count and looks synthetic in every tool we tested.

Focus errors and motion blur are not recoverable at any scale factor.

Is there a genuinely free AI video upscaler?

Video2X is genuinely free, open source under the GPL, and runs entirely on your own hardware with no watermark, no export limit and no account. It bundles Real-ESRGAN for live-action footage and Real-CUGAN and Anime4K for animation.

The cost is setup time and GPU hours rather than money, and the most common reason people report poor results is running an animation model on camera footage.

Does Topaz still sell a perpetual licence?

No.

Topaz Labs no longer offers a perpetual licence for Topaz Video or any of its other products, and its published pricing is subscription-only at $59 a month or $299 a year for Video, with the full Topaz Studio bundle at $399 a year personal and $799 a year commercial.

Older articles recommending a one-time Topaz purchase are describing terms that no longer exist. If you cancel, you keep files you already rendered and lose the ability to render new ones.

How much does it cost to upscale one hour of video?

Upscaling one hour of footage costs between $0.00 and $479.40 in year one depending entirely on the tool and how much else you process.

On a per-minute basis at ten hours a year, Video2X is free, Winxvideo AI is about $0.09, Aiarty is about $0.28, DaVinci Resolve Studio is about $0.49, Topaz Video is about $0.50, and Pixop stays flat at roughly $0.10 to $0.50 regardless of volume because it charges per minute rather than per month.

Topaz Video vs DaVinci Resolve Super Scale: which is better?

Topaz Video produces better results, particularly on compressed archival footage and fine detail such as foliage and hair, while DaVinci Resolve Studio's Super Scale is close enough for most work and costs $295 once rather than $299 every year.

The deciding question is whether upscaling is the product you sell or a step inside an edit. Restoration specialists should pay for Topaz. Editors who occasionally have older footage in a timeline should use Super Scale.

Is Super Scale available in the free version of DaVinci Resolve?

No. Super Scale is a Studio-only feature, along with the DaVinci Neural Engine tools, temporal noise reduction and Magic Mask. DaVinci Resolve Studio costs $295 as a one-time perpetual purchase.

This catches people regularly because Resolve's free version is unusually complete in every other respect, so it is reasonable to assume upscaling is included when it is not.

Will upscaled footage pass a broadcast or streaming delivery spec?

Upscaled footage generally passes automated technical QC because resolution, codec, bit depth and bitrate are what those checks measure, and a 3840x2160 file meets a 3840x2160 requirement regardless of how the pixels were produced.

It does not satisfy a contract that specifies native 4K capture, which is a different requirement and treating them as the same is a breach rather than a workaround.

Archive material inside documentaries, mixed-era cuts and web delivery routinely accept upscaled footage.

Do I need a powerful GPU for AI video upscaling?

For local tools, yes, and it is the practical constraint rather than the software price. Every locally rendering tool here took several times a clip's runtime to process it on an RTX 4070, and heavier models took considerably longer.

Without a modern discrete GPU, a fifty-hour archive becomes impractical rather than merely slow, which is the situation cloud services such as Pixop and Topaz Astra exist to solve.

Which upscaler is best for old, heavily compressed footage?

Topaz Video is clearly the best tool for compressed archival material because it ships models trained specifically on compression artefacts, and on our 720p archival transfer it recovered readable detail that every other tool turned to mush.

Aiarty Video Enhancer is the runner-up when the problem is noise rather than blocking. Free and mid-price tools are at their weakest here, because many models interpret compression block edges as real edges and sharpen them.

Is a one-time licence better value than a subscription for upscaling?

A one-time licence is better value for almost everyone in this category, because upscaling is bursty work rather than daily work.

Winxvideo AI at $54.95 once and Aiarty at $165 once both keep working with no renewal, and DaVinci Resolve Studio at $295 once includes an entire editor.

The case for a subscription is narrow: you need the best possible output quality, which means Topaz, or you need cloud rendering because your hardware cannot cope.

Does upscaling increase the file size a lot?

Yes, substantially, and it is a cost people forget to plan for.

A 4K master carries roughly four times the pixel data of the 1080p source, and if you export to a high-quality intermediate codec such as ProRes rather than a delivery codec, an hour of footage can occupy hundreds of gigabytes.

Budget the storage before you start a large archive job, because running out of disk at hour thirty of a render is a common and avoidable failure.

Can I upscale video on a Mac without a discrete GPU?

Yes. Apple silicon handles these workloads far better than an equivalent Intel Mac, and Topaz Video, Winxvideo AI, Aiarty and Video2X all run natively on Apple silicon.

Expect slower renders than a desktop with a modern discrete card, and expect the machine to be effectively occupied while it works.

For a MacBook that also needs to be your editing machine, cloud rendering is the more practical route despite the worse economics.

What is the difference between upscaling and frame interpolation?

Upscaling increases spatial resolution by inventing new pixels within each frame, while frame interpolation increases temporal resolution by inventing entirely new frames between existing ones.

They are separate operations solving separate problems, and several tools here do both.

Interpolation is the more dangerous of the two on real footage, because invented frames on fast motion produce visible warping, and it is best reserved for converting frame rates rather than for creating slow motion.

Final Verdict: The Best AI Video Upscaling Tool in 2026

Topaz Video produces the best results in this category and it is now rented rather than owned, at $299 a year with no perpetual option, and if restoration quality is the thing your client is paying for then that is simply the cost of the work.

For everyone else the honest answer is cheaper. DaVinci Resolve Studio at $295 once includes Super Scale inside a full editor and covers the large majority of real jobs. Video2X costs nothing and is better than its reputation.

Winxvideo AI at $54.95 once is the cheapest thing here we would hand to a client.

Where these tools lose, plainly: none of them fixes focus, none of them fixes motion blur, and any vendor implying otherwise is selling you a disappointment. Upscaling reliably buys one resolution step on well-shot footage and no more.

If a delivery contract specifies native 4K capture, none of this is a workaround.

Where Framekit loses, and it is worth saying directly: Framekit does not process or host video, so it is not an alternative to anything on this list.

It is where the finished work is presented afterward, and a filmmaker who needs long-form playback still wants a dedicated video host embedded into the page rather than relying on us for it.

The short version. Restoration as a business: Topaz Video, and check the commercial licence tier. Editing with occasional old footage: DaVinci Resolve Studio. No budget: Video2X. No subscription: Winxvideo AI.

Noisy low-light material: Aiarty. A genuinely large archive: Pixop, because it is the only pricing model that survives the volume.

Resolve Studio keeps appearing as the value answer in this corner of the toolchain: it also holds the best free compositor in the best After Effects alternatives.

Related readingthe best video editing software, the best AI image upscalers, the best video hosting platforms, the best color grading software, and the best website builders for filmmakers.