Earlier this month Nvidia surprised the market and released the beta for their RTX Voice service, a noise cancellation plugin that utilizes the company's huge expertise in AI machine learning to diminish or eliminate background noise for your voice chats. To put it in Nvidia's better-than-my words from their product page:
NVIDIA RTX Voice is a new plugin that leverages NVIDIA RTX GPUs and their AI capabilities to remove distracting background noise from your broadcasts, voice chats, and remote video conferencing meetings. This allows users to "go live" or join a meeting without having to worry about unwanted sounds like loud keyboard typing or other ambient noise in noisy environments. RTX Voice also suppresses background noise from players in loud environments, making incoming audio easier to understand.
Given the marketing wank here and the rocky history of the RTX branding as not "just working" as claimed, a fair bit of skepticism came from this surprise launch. However, from early reviews of the technology, it actually works incredibly well.
So just what the hell is going on here? RTX Voice has been in development behind the scenes at Nvidia for a while now, but it seems like development on Voice was rushed to beta due to the ongoing COVID-19 issue.
Like many of you, we’re all trying to adjust to our new normal. Our homes are now a shared office, streaming studio, and gaming den all in one. We’ve been silently working away on RTX Voice - our noise-cancelling app - but wanted to get this in your hands as soon as possible via an early-access community beta. The product is still in development, but we hope you find it useful!
It's absolutely worth mentioning that this is definitely an early beta product. Driver support is rocky, the installation seems to crap out if you run it while any audio equipment you'd be using is disconnected from your computer, and it does make a small-but-noticeable impact on your gaming performance. But given just how well this works so far, I wouldn't be surprised if Nvidia is able to iron all of this out very quickly. From a technical standpoint this is actually a pretty incredible product. Early reviews have RTX Voice almost or entirely cancelling out the sound-barrier-shattering clicks of blue keyboard switches, PC fan noises, children yelling in the background, and just about everything else thrown at it.
Despite the RTX branding, David Lake on the Guru3d forum discovered a pretty nifty workaround to trick RTX voice to work on any 10XX or 16XX GTX card. This is clearly unintentional, as the official product page does list that an RTX card is required, and it's almost a certainty that Nvidia will fix this over time. Still, it does just work, though not as well as on an RTX card and with a bigger FPS hit than the more advanced Turing cards. For now, at least, it might be worth giving a try.
