Nvidia's new Broadcast app is a smart evolution of RTX Voice for both streaming and chatting

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Nvidia's new 30-series graphics cards are promising some amazing performance improvements, like the $500 RTX 3070 outperforming the 2080 Ti. But Nvidia's also hyping up other features exclusive to its graphics cards, and one of the new ones launching in September, Nvidia Broadcast, seems like it'll be useful for just about everyone with a gaming PC. Broadcast is an app built on RTX Voice that makes it easier for streamers—or anyone who uses a webcam and voice chat, really—to play games and talk at the same time.

When Nvidia launched RTX Voice in beta earlier this year, we marveled at how well it could cut out background noise, from a loud fan to even the clackiest mechanical keyboard. For the most part, it works better than any other noise canceling tech we've seen (although a recent driver update has turned executive editor Tyler Wilde into a static monster in some of our video meetings). It works based on "the power of AI," which is buzzwordy but it's hard to argue with the results.

Like RTX Voice, Nvidia Broadcast includes that noise removal for both your microphone and incoming audio "to mute that one keyboard-mashing friend who won’t turn on push-to-talk." If you look at the interface in the demo video above, it seems like Broadcast will have some other effects to apply to incoming audio rather than just noise removal. Maybe you can make your friends sound like they're underwater, or something.

With the current application, applying RTX Voice to incoming audio filters all of your audio output, including game audio or music, so it's not useful in all situations. Broadcast looks to be the same, but it'll still be quite handy for chatting with someone without hearing a siren going off outside their window.

Broadcast also offers some AI-driven webcam features: a virtual background replacement that scans for your face and can blur out the room behind you or replace the image altogether. That's a pretty standard feature for video chat software like Zoom, and you shouldn't expect it to be quite as clean as a proper green screen, but it's still a nice feature for streamers who don't want to mess with all that extra hardware.

Auto Frame is the other handy webcam tool. It "zooms in on you and uses AI to track your head movements, keeping you at the center of the action even as you shift from side to side." Again, multi-angle or camera crops are something you could configure with more hardware or presets in software like OBS, but Nvidia's simplifying the process. Auto Frame and Virtual Background will launch as betas, like RTX Voice did, to hone the AI.

None of this is exclusive to the RTX 30-series; Broadcast will work on any RTX card. While I imagine most of us won't ever bother with the video features, but RTX Voice alone getting better at erasing background noise is a boon to anyone who buys a new Nvidia card. It'll be out later in September.

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Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).