I guess they had to find a use for the silicon they are charging everyone for.

Interested to see if it actually works and also how much, if any, it takes away from game performance if the game is using the cores for something already like DLSS.

Tensor Cores, a solution looking for a problem in the consumer space. :)

Interesting, I rarely stream with RTX on so this would be an interesting use case. OBS has a decent built in noise gate but keyboard clicks still get through at times, so i'd be curious to give it a try.

When not streaming I can continue to have RTX & DLSS enabled and enjoy raytracing :)

The question now is: how much Latency does this add to the audio signal.

meuvoy
The question now is: how much Latency does this add to the audio signal.

oh no no no my boy, the question is “how much can we get away with charging for this little trinket”. Have you learned nothing from the last few years pricing strategies?

Can't say I've ever had much of a problem with anyones' background noise, apart from one guy who has parrots in the same room as his PC. Occasionally one of those will yelp or squawk or whistle or do something else that fires over the airwaves like a bullet and cuts through your skull at the most inappropriate moment… I bet this tech still does nothing to shut the little cretins up, though!!

Ttaskmaster
Can't say I've ever had much of a problem with anyones' background noise, apart from one guy who has parrots in the same room as his PC. Occasionally one of those will yelp or squawk or whistle or do something else that fires over the airwaves like a bullet and cuts through your skull at the most inappropriate moment… I bet this tech still does nothing to shut the little cretins up, though!!

<nvidia> no you have, remember? You remember don't you? No really, you DO remember. REMEMBER!

Nvidia integrate tensor tech on Microsoft Word so that they can write reports for me.

It seems to work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rd7c7FVofOE

ik9000
<nvidia> no you have, remember? You remember don't you? No really, you DO remember. REMEMBER!

I remember that I have Remember Me on Steam and still haven't played it…
Beyond that, you'll have to come show me. Better yet, bring me one o' yer fancy 2080Ti graphics cards, let me see this amazing new tech for myself…!!

Ttaskmaster
I remember that I have Remember Me on Steam and still haven't played it…
Beyond that, you'll have to come show me. Better yet, bring me one o' yer fancy 2080Ti graphics cards, let me see this amazing new tech for myself…!!

certainly sir, and how would sir be paying, would that be credit card, bit coin, or kidney donation?

The problem of Noise cancelling is not difficult at all for hardware. Most mid tier headphones have it. And if you want proof it works on CPU alone, here you go KRISP software https://krisp.ai/ that does exactly the same without requiring GPU of any kind…

But kids going to like it xD

ik9000
certainly sir, and how would sir be paying, would that be credit card, bit coin, or kidney donation?

You're not too fussed about who I take the kidney from, are you…?

A Guru3D forum users says that RTX Voice works on GTX 10 and 16 cards if you fiddle with the extracted installer file. Indicates that the app must use a CUDA-based GPGPU codepath rather than Tensor cores, and understandably Nvidia was quiet about that. https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/nvidia-rtx-voice-works-without-rtx-gpu-heres-how.431781/
I haven't tested this.

So, i've used this for calls all morning and it's actually really impressive - works really, really well.

It works both ways - i.e. for your microphone & speakers - and the difference is stark.

After my testing i've decided to only enable it for speakers (inbound sound) as I don't have any real background noise at home personally (And it does some odd things for keyboard click removal - so i'll keep my noise gates for that) but for incoming sound, the difference is night and day.

Someone joined one of our morning calls today and had a nasty buzz in his microphone - very annoying whenever he spoke. Enable this though and the buzz completely vanished and his voice came through loud and clear.

After 4 weeks now of constant conference/video calls over teams i've encountered so many different qualities of microphone/background noise and so on, and it can be super distracting (particularly if it's the echo type as someone doesn't want to use a headset!) - this will make my life much more comfortable whilst stuck at home :)

Good job Nvidia.

While I understand people saying “Tensor cores - a solution looking for a problem”, I don't agree with that at all.

I tested this out last night on Discord, no more needing to mute my microphone to type on my Cherry MX Blues, it just completely blocks it out, while maintaining the vast majority of my audio quality.
Here's an excellent demonstration by Barnacules. https://clips.twitch.tv/EnthusiasticPricklyGoblinDatSheffy

I'm all for this. It's early doors but it's already working well and showing a lot of promise. Fingers crossed their AI can learn to block out annoying children, dogs barking, creaking chairs, screaming relatives and all that stuff. Nothing more annoying than listening to someone else's house through your headset.

Seemingly the program also works on non-RTX cards, with a CUDA fall-back, but the quality and latency suffers somewhat from the less optimised cores compared to the Tensor AI.

Tensor are not AI cores - they do certain mathematical operations more efficiently,ie,matrix operations. If you look at where these kind of operations were mostly used in,it wasn't consumer workloads.

Of course, this also means you can no longer skive off work or ignore tasks with the excuse of not having heard the instruction clearly during the web meeting…!!

Hoonigan
While I understand people saying “Tensor cores - a solution looking for a problem”, I don't agree with that at all.

Maybe the BBC *bing* can use it on the *ding* interviews where people forget *beep* to turn off notifications. ;)

Hoonigan
Seemingly the program also works on non-RTX cards, with a CUDA fall-back, but the quality and latency suffers somewhat from the less optimised cores compared to the Tensor AI.

I gather you can get hearing aids that use this sort of technology, because some things you want muted out but you really want to hear that bus roaring towards you as you cross the road.

Which begs the question, if a hearing aid can pack the electronics to do this (partly as a battery saving technique), why does it even require a GPU? Oh, because CUDA lock-in. We can see so far because we stand on the feet of giants, *sigh*

DanceswithUnix
I gather you can get hearing aids that use this sort of technology, because some things you want muted out but you really want to hear that bus roaring towards you as you cross the road.

Which begs the question, if a hearing aid can pack the electronics to do this (partly as a battery saving technique), why does it even require a GPU? Oh, because CUDA lock-in. We can see so far because we stand on the feet of giants, *sigh*

It also runs on normal Nvidia GPUs with some tweaks:
https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/nvidia-rtx-voice-works-without-rtx-gpus-with-a-simple-modification.html

CAT-THE-FIFTH
It also runs on normal Nvidia GPUs with some tweaks:
https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/nvidia-rtx-voice-works-without-rtx-gpus-with-a-simple-modification.html

So I can run it on one of my horribly overpriced Quadro cards, lovely. Given one of the cards is in a drawer in the garage because it is a piece of junk, and the other is in the laptop that thanks to the unusable Thunderbolt docking station I'll pass. My usual machine for meetings is an i5 laptop with Intel graphics.

I stopped buying Nvidia because they do stuff like this. If they think it is going to increase sales, in my case they are wrong. I can understand after their brush with Intel litigation why they became so paranoid, but I don't want to be a part of it.

DanceswithUnix
My usual machine for meetings is an i5 laptop with Intel graphics. I stopped buying Nvidia because they do stuff like this. If they think it is going to increase sales, in my case they are wrong. I can understand after their brush with Intel litigation why they became so paranoid, but I don't want to be a part of it.

This makes no sense at all.

You stop buying nvidia cards because they offer free and unique but exclusive software and tools for your graphics card that competitors are unable to offer or match (competitors offer only barebones features). You believe that finding new innovative features and uses for hardware is “anti-competitive” because the features do not run on competing hardware - but despite your belief there is no investigation or sanction imposed on nvidia for alleged bad practices, and I see no reason why nvidia should incur development costs to support their competition (nvidia is not a charity) and nothing prevents said competition from developing the same features for their hardware.

Yet at the same time, you prefer Intel who does NOT offer any such software and tools (leaving you with only basic features for the hardware you paid for) and Intel is widely known to practice anti-competition behavior (see the various lawsuits, regulatory investigations, and sanctions/fines against Intel around the world).

You do know that Intel is doing the very same thing what you are criticizing with the CPU extensions (e.g. Intel SSE, AVX instructions, etc.) which competitors had to pay and license for the right to be able to use them?

You say you don't use nvidia cards since you don't want to be a part of something you perceive as “wrong” but by supporting Intel you are already a part of the very thing you are condemning.

Why is it wrong for nvidia to offer new tools to service their customers?

Don't get me wrong, nvidia is not perfect of course and I also had to spend time to tweak the install file of the rtx voice to make it work on my GTX card.

But at least I am realistic enough to see that companies are all the same and am not claiming that we should burn one company at the stake for its alleged bad practices while supporting a competitor who does the very same thing.

alexis_lemarie
You stop buying nvidia cards because they offer free and unique but exclusive software and tools for your graphics card that competitors are unable to offer or match (competitors offer only barebones features).

No, I stopped buying Nvidia because I am a largely a Linux user. My day job can't realistically be done on Windows. I'm interacting with servers and programming embedded systems and just about everything around you is a Linux box from your router to your TV. That's the eco system I'm working in, and Nvidia basically put a big middle finger up to the Linux user base some years ago and don't seem to be changing that stance any time soon.

As for their “inventions”, they basically bought up and killed off Physix which was a promising up-coming technology. They took the idea of using a GPU as a general purpose computing unit (something they neither invented or in the early days were even capable of) and split the market down the middle with CUDA. Their best idea, GSync, of bending laptop power saving technology for better gaming could have been done without milking customers in such a way that it was clearly doomed from the start.

I am quite aware that Intel are a convicted monopolist, I have no love of that company. But this was a rant about Nvidia, because when I saw “any card can enable CUDA to run this” it saddens me that they are still trying to nail consumers down with their tech.

DanceswithUnix
because I am a largely a Linux user.

So… irrelevant, but as usual for linux (end-)users very vocal. Gotcha.


In case anyone else wants to try this out on their non-RTX card (and doesn't want to rely on premodded stuff from another forum):

Grab the RTX voice installer ( https://developer.download.nvidia.com/rtx/broadcast_engine/RTX_Voice/NVIDIA_RTX_Voice_v0.5.12.6.exe ), unpack it with winrar, 7zip or whatever to somewhere,
go into the subfolder “NVRTXVoice\NvAFX”, open the “RTXVoice.nvi” with notepad, then find and delete this 3 line section out of it, save the file and then run the setup.exe. Done.

<constraints>
<property name=“Feature.RTXVoice” level=“silent” text=“${{InstallBlockedMessage}}”/>
</constraints>

People have tried this on countless cards and it generally seems to work fine down to 1st gen Maxwell (so GTX 750 (Ti)), though it does cost quite a noticeable chunk of performance in games (even on my GTX 1080).

RTX Voice wasn't designed to be RTX exclusive, but marketing probably pushed it into that direction. It was meant for an optional streamer utility package that can be integrated into OBS, along with something that *does* need a RTX card, a piece of software that deals with all the usual greenscreen issues. The greenscreen stuff was shown off multiple times, but now even a year later nothing happened (still no updates on the status, let alone any public version of it). I guess they released RTX voice just to have something at all, and marketing got in the way and wanted this to be exclusive to the overpriced RTX cards even though there's no technical reason for it. All it needs is a minimum CUDA version and drivers that aren't years out of date.

Bambooz
So… irrelevant, but as usual for linux (end-)users very vocal. Gotcha.

I am not a Linux user myself to any degree,but what he said is true even if my a few of my last cards have been Nvidia. PhysX wasn't invented by Nvidia,it was invented by a company called Ageia but they bought it up. To make it look better on GPUs,they hobbled the version which ran on CPUs,by making it X87 dependent and single threaded. Now a decade later,they finally stopped doing that and made it run OK on a CPU…but its too late now as plenty of companies just developed their own physics implementations inhouse.

GSync,aka,adaptive sync wasn't invented by Nvidia - the VESA consortium actually was trying to bring it into the mainstream - FreeSync was the AMD branding for the AMD software interface for VESA adaptive sync. Scaler makers were slowly introducing support over time. Nvidia was part of the VESA consortium,and in laptops GSync/FreeSync are the same,due to the way laptop display standards differ. Now,Nvidia supports it - if they had been behind it,we would have had a more concerted effort by scaler makers.

Even with CUDA,there were other cross-platform initiatives,but DWL is correct,it's lead to a few competing standards for GPU compute now,so its an entire mess. There were attempts to standardise,but its gone nowhere. In fact most of the scientific computing is not done using Windows,its usually under Linux.

Regarding Linux,AMD open source drivers are better,than what Nvidia has bothered to do,which is an ironic reversal of things,as Nvidia for several years was much better. CUDA,OpenCL,Metal,etc. Some of the most vocal supporters of Nvidia used to be Linux users,10 years ago. So from my experience more and more Linux users are migrating elsewhere now,and Intel also put a lot of effort into open source support.

Edit!!

Also another thing - to say Linux is irrelevant is kind of daft. Android is based on the Linux kernel itself. Its much more commonplace than people realise. Lots of people will be working behind the scenes on development for such platforms.

CAT-THE-FIFTH
Also another thing - to say Linux is irrelevant is kind of daft. Android is based on the Linux kernel itself. Its much more commonplace than people realise. Lots of people will be working behind the scenes on development for such platforms.

I think your basic problem is you hate closed source software, and Nvidia are a company with a lot of it. Their closed source linux driver is very good, tbh all their closed source stuff (cuda, gsync, rtx voice, etc) is very good. Hence for a proper company using linux nvidia is great - they don't care about supporting open source they just want a stable reliable product with good support, and are willing to pay extra for that. Exactly what Nvidia provides and why it is so rich. To do that they have sacrificed the much smaller enthusiast open source market.

Dribble
I think your basic problem is you hate closed source software, and Nvidia are a company with a lot of it. Their closed source linux driver is very good, tbh all their closed source stuff (cuda, gsync, rtx voice, etc) is very good. Hence for a proper company using linux nvidia is great - they don't care about supporting open source they just want a stable reliable product with good support, and are willing to pay extra for that. Exactly what Nvidia provides and why it is so rich. To do that they have sacrificed the much smaller enthusiast open source market.

I have a Nvidia GPU and use Windows,which I said in the first line of my post - DWL is the Linux user,so maybe you need to read a few posts up.

Also,as a complete reversal of a few years ago:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=march-2020-gaming&num=2

That is a comparison of Nvidia proprietary drivers against AMD open source drivers.


Valve is also putting its support towards the AMD driver effort too,which is further improving AMD graphics performance over what was seen previously:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=radeon-software-20&num=6

Remember this is an open source driver.

I can see why Linux users,are a bit dissapointed by Nvidia…they are starting to get complacent with their Linux support. 10 years ago,AMD was the one no Linux user would use,and a lot of Linux owners were vocal Nvidia users too.

Dribble
I think your basic problem is you hate closed source software,

Actually, I'm a programmer, closed source pays quite nicely for my house and my car habit. But I do not have time to waste on chasing crappy driver nonsense. I plug in an AMD card and it works, no driver download, no drama, just decent drivers.

I got quite far through interviewing for a job at Nvidia before getting a better offer, so I don't hate the company. Some of their engineering is pretty good, the Denver CPU being one of the few genuinely interesting developments in processors in the last decade, but as a business they treat their customers like something to harvest and I'm not into that. They used to be the Linux user's GPU of choice, but now they aren't. Fingers crossed one day they improve.

So, last night a colleague and I had the idea of testing out the RTX Audio output, that removes background noise from other people's microphones, but with a twist.
I put The Big Bang Theory on, with a very obvious laughing track added between the gags.

Honestly, words won't even come close to how eerily well it removed the laughing track, I didn't hear it once. It was almost as if it could pull apart the two audio streams pre-merge and just throw one away entirely.

This technology is the real deal, and it's not even close to being a finished piece of software yet. Very clever indeed!

Hoonigan
I put The Big Bang Theory on, with a very obvious laughing track added between the gags.

Honestly, words won't even come close to how eerily well it removed the laughing track, I didn't hear it once. It was almost as if it could pull apart the two audio streams pre-merge and just throw one away entirely.

Interesting use case! Slightly OT but did you find the show as funny without it? It's interesting just how different sitcoms in particular are without an audience or laughter track - I remember those episodes of Red Dwarf filmed without one and they were….terrible. But watch a fan-made edit with laughter tracks inserted, and it became brilliant again. Same is true of panel shows - watching “have I got news for you” is almost painful now (in fact, I've given up) without an audience - it's just not the same.

As a side note though, TBBT was filmed with a live studio audience - they didn't use a laughter track. The way they are re-edited for UK broadcast often makes it seem like there is one though, as the odd second is cut here or there (plus if you are watching a daytime broadcast version, they often cut words too) plus the US ad breaks are not always removed that well…it can mess things up ;)

I was about to ^mention Red Dwarf myself!

Spud1
Interesting use case! Slightly OT but did you find the show as funny without it?

I didn't watch anywhere near enough to really see if it was funny, it was certainly odd though. The pauses of silence between the jokes were awkward.
I really liked the show in it's typical format, watched all 11 seasons and keep going back to it, it's great for a bit of background noise.

I'm using this now and it's incredible just how well this works.

Man, RTX buyers must be overjoyed right now. Ray-tracing AND noise suppression? Hot damn was that purchase worth it!

I noticed when looking up some motherboard options that Asus have had this technology from about 6 months before Nvidia released it. Well they kept that quiet (ironically :D )

Looks like it originally was embedded in a dedicated processor in their headsets so you can use the feature with any device without needing to be strapped to a PC, but they are now shipping the feature with up-coming ROG motherboards; it was a B550 board that I spotted it on.

https://www.asus.com/AI-Noise-Cancelling-Microphone/
https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/ROG-STRIX-B550-E-GAMING/

I wonder how many other companies have this product that we don't know about.

I think Discord has it as a plug in?

Terbinator
I think Discord has it as a plug in?

So it does, and apparently available stand alone.

https://krisp.ai/discord/?ref=Discord

Free for 2 hours use per week, or $3.30 per month for more. So a motherboard with the same tech would pay for itself in two years :)