You can now turn on Nvidia's excellent noise cancellation with any GeForce GPU

Nvidia RTX Voice Broadcast Engine
(Image credit: Nvidia)

Nvidia's noise removal feature, formerly released as RTX Voice, does a pretty stellar job of removing unwanted background noise for your microphone and PC audio. You can see for yourself in the video below if you don't believe me. At its release, almost a year ago, it was officially limited to RTX graphics cards, but with the latest update Nvidia has opened it up to anyone with a GeForce, Titan, or Quadro GPU.

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With the latest update to RTX Voice, which now goes by 'Noise Removal' in the RTX Broadcast app, it's possible to run the feature across a wide range of GPU generations (nice spot, Tom's Hardware). You'll need to pick up the latest version of the Broadcast app to get it up and running. From there it's fairly self-explanatory: you open the app, select your mic input, and decide what degree you'd like to remove unwanted background noise.

This isn't actually RTX Voice's first outing on non-RTX cards. While short of official support, not long after launch it was discovered a simple code change would enable the RTX Voice feature on non-RTX cards. In our testing at the time we discovered the RTX 1080 would take a comparatively larger hit to performance while the feature is enabled, though.

The potential performance hit is something to be aware of if you're hoping to run the noise removal feature on older cards and can't spare the frames.

If you're in a noisy room, or holding a hoover to your head as per the video above, Nvidia's noise removal feature has proven a mighty tool in cutting that noise out. So if you have an Nvidia card, it's certainly one way to go.

If you are rocking AMD, or simply prefer to try out an alternative, Discord offers built-in Krisp noise removal, which is also available as a standalone app. Beyond software, there are devices such as the Asus Noise-Cancelling AI Mic Adapter, which offer much of the same functionality in a discrete hardware package and cut the load of that extra processing from your PC.

Jacob Ridley
Managing Editor, Hardware

Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog. From there, he graduated to professionally breaking things as hardware writer at PCGamesN, and would go on to run the team as hardware editor. He joined PC Gamer's top staff as senior hardware editor before becoming managing editor of the hardware team, and you'll now find him reporting on the latest developments in the technology and gaming industries and testing the newest PC components.

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