Nvidia mildly blew our minds in 2020 when its graphics cards gained the ability to delete practically all the background noise from our audio calls with a free app, and now the company’s doing it again. My colleague and Verge senior news editor Richard Lawler just fired up Nvidia’s just-announced “Studio Voice” feature on his RTX 3070 — and it made his Logitech webcam’s awful built-in microphone sound downright respectable.
The first clip you’ll hear is Richard on his podcasting mic, then the crummy Logitech C922 webcam mic, and lastly, the webcam mic with Nvidia’s feature turned on.
It’s part of an update to the free Nvidia Broadcast app, as is another new feature called “Virtual Key Light” that we found slightly less impressive, at least in our very first test. It’s supposed to “deliver even lighting, as if a physical key light was defining the form and dimension of an individual.” Here are Richard’s before and after shots of that:
Technically, Nvidia says these features require an RTX 4080 or RTX 5090 and are “not recommended for gaming,” and we’re guessing that’s because they hit the GPU hard. “The key light seems to be stretching my 3070 to its limits,” says Richard. “But the voice thing works, I just couldn’t play a game at the same time based on how much VRAM it’s using.”
Nvidia says the new update also “improves voice quality with the Background Noise Removal feature, adds gaze stability and subtle random eye movements for a more natural appearance with Eye Contact, and improves foreground and background separation with Virtual Background.” You can find the Nvidia Broadcast app here.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
