I’ve run some tests of my own on 5 typical images for myself. The photos were taken at a black tie function, and were a mixture of head and shoulder pictures of people in the crowd socialising, and wide photos of the event space.
These images were all captured using the available light in the room (very little) and were shot at 6400 iso and either f2.8 (24-70 Nikon S) f1.8 (85mm Nikon S), or Sigma 70-200 f2.8, Z6ii camera body. All images were captured with the aperture wide open due to the low light.
Processing was done using a Mac Mini M1 with 8Gb memory.
PL5 DeepPrime processing time for the 5 images - 30s
PL6 DeepPrime processing time for the 5 images - 29s
PL6 DeepPrime XD processing time for the 5 images - 58s
I repeated the exports twice and got very similar times each attempt (I didn’t bother to average them, I have listed the fastest for each).
Now the crux, when viewing the whole image full screen on a 27" 4k calibrated BenQ monitor I really couldn’t make any difference out between the DPo and DPxd images.
I had to zoom in to 100% to make any difference out.
Hair was very slightly sharper, and some of the out of focus areas on images shot with the 85mm and 70-200mm lenses were smoother and had a tiny bit less noise. But it really was marginal and I had to go searching for differences.
For the wide room shots taken with the 24-70 lens I could not make any difference out in fine detail nor out of focus areas.
For my limited test I didn’t have any unwanted extra artifacts adding in to the images when using XD.
So for me, considering the doubling of processing time, I shall be giving DeepPrime XD a pass for now. I simply don’t feel myself nor my clients will benefit from it.
I shall continue to be interested in other peoples experiences of it though, and maybe your insights will lead me to finding a beneficial use for it at some point.