You can get Nvidia’s “RTX Voice” noise filtering without a pricey RTX card

Enlarge / Despite the name, you don't actually need an RTX-branded card like this one to run "RTX Voice" background noise cancellation. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

Earlier this month, Nvidia launched RTX Voice, a beta plugin that "leverages NVIDIA RTX GPUs and their AI capabilities to remove distracting background noise from your broadcasts and voice chats," as Nvidia put it in its announcement. But despite the "RTX" branding, Ars testing confirms that the feature also works perfectly well on older GTX-level graphics cards. And despite that finding, Nvidia's installer refuses to allow the app on systems with non-RTX cards, unless the user performs some unintended config-file tinkering.

First, the good news: Nvidia's GTX Voice technology actually works really well. As you can hear in the test sample below, turning on the feature filters out almost all of the mechanical keyboard clicking picked up by a standard webcam microphone. That's likely to be an especially useful feature for anyone who has tried typing notes during a Zoom video call or dealt with kids screaming in other rooms during the same.

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An Ars Technica test of Nvidia's "RTX Voice" beta, running on a GTX 1060 graphics card.

Now for the more questionable news: the "RTX" in "RTX Voice" seems to be a marketing misnomer. We know this only because of a workaround (seemingly first disclosed publicly by a Guru3D forum poster) that tricks the RTX Voice installer into working on a system with an older Nvidia graphics card. The process is as simple as running the installer, editing out a few lines from a temporary configuration file it creates, and then running the installer again without the "constraint" check active.

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