NVIDIA RTX Voice is a powerful piece of technology with huge potential for gamers, streamers, and voice/video conference users alike. By using Tensor Cores in RTX GPUs, it manages to achieve the highest level and best quality of microphone background noise removal I have ever heard. It's like something you've seen on CSI or expect to come out of Area 51. As you can hear in my microphone samples, it successfully deals with various difficult scenarios. It will massively quieten down (or completely filter out) your mechanical keyboard and the whirring of your fans, but also does so much more than that. It effectively kills background noises no other solution on the market can handle so elegantly. There are people talking or someone's watching TV in the same room and you're gaming? No problem—RTX Voice will make them inaudible to your teammates or your streaming audience. Your dog started barking or someone decided to turn on the vacuum cleaner as soon as you jumped into an online meeting? Your coworkers won't hear any of it—RTX Voice will make sure of that. Quite honestly, at times it feels like black magic.

The tech isn't only powerful, it's also free (assuming you own an RTX card, although some workarounds are already circling around) and very easy to use. The reason why RTX Voice can be made to run on GPUs without Tensor Cores is that NVIDIA's Tensor Core API will automatically use the CUDA shaders on older architectures. This comes with a significant performance hit in games that are higher than on Turing because the shaders will now have to switch between processing audio and rendering the game graphics. Another caveat is that RTX Voice increases the power consumption of your graphics card, in a quick test by around 30 watts, which is not insignificant, but not unexpected, either. This also means that using RTX Voice will eat into your card's power budget, which is a card-wide limit, so boost clocks could end up being lower than without RTX Voice.

NVIDIA's timing couldn't be better—with most of the world being on lockdown, more people than ever are looking for ways to improve their VoIP/video conferencing experience. A vast majority of the office-going population is working from home in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. For many, this means regular voice and video-based collaboration with teammates or clients. Although people these days are a lot more accommodating to ambient background noise from a courtesy standpoint, some forms of background noise can be a genuine impediment to your conversations, like vacuum cleaners, infants, pets, noisy neighbors, other people in the household, etc. With lockdowns in effect, not many have access to high-end noise-cancellation gear, or it's already sold out. Computational noise-cancellation is not only a boon, it's a godsend. What's more, RTX Voice also clears up incoming voice without the other person even having it installed. This is especially useful if you're trying to listen to school or university lectures and your teacher is a dog person.

It's not all peachy, though—at least not for hardcore gamers. My initial set of synthetic benchmarks shows a significant performance drop when the RTX Voice technology is used on the microphone input, and an even larger drop when it's applied to both input and output. This aspect of the technology requires much more in-depth testing, although it doesn't make too much sense to spend time on it at this very moment since the software is still in beta and likely lacks a ton of optimizing. Even with a 20% performance hit, I could see gamers willing to accept it for the crystal clear audio they get in return.

The promise of RTX Voice could strengthen NVIDIA's foothold in business computers and laptops as this is a capability many companies have desired for years. I have no doubts that the technology can be refined even further and possibly make it into phones, too. NVIDIA is very active in developing automotive hardware, and RTX Voice could turn out to be a unique selling point for cars—think of voice command and phone calls. Most gamers who own an RTX graphics card are welcome to start using RTX Voice in its current state right now. The same goes for anyone who doesn't really care about its gaming performance impact—VoIP and video conference users definitely fall into this category. RTX Voice could very well go down as the best thing NVIDIA ever gave away for free.