AMD is apparently working to equip its Radeon GPUs with noise-canceling cuts, in a system that will theoretically rival Nvidia’s RTX Voice technology (now renamed by Team Green as ‘Noise Removal’ – more on that later).
Team Red is set to call it AMD Noise Suppression, and we got a glimpse of the feature thanks to a video on the company’s official YouTube channel – although that clip was quickly taken down (or rather made private) when people learned of this.
Fortunately, as Tom’s Hardware (opens in new tab) reports, an on-the-ball redditor (opens in new tab) (‘crazydaveyboy’) captured and shared the relevant details, and there was even a teaser video about Noise Suppression posted elsewhere on reddit (opens in new tab) (and while the post was removed by mods, the short clip is still visible).
AMD Noise Suppression is, according to these leaked details, designed to let you “communicate without distractions” and provides “two-way noise reduction for input and output” that works in “various apps and games”.
Essentially, it will clean up the audio using AI (deep learning) in the same way as RTX Voice as mentioned, improving the audio quality of your chats or video streams, suppressing any background noise as the name suggests.
As per the aforementioned Redditor, the feature will be under the Audio & Video tab in the Radeon Adrenalin driver, and turning it on will install a new virtual audio device (which sounds exactly how RTX Voice works) that you can use in whatever apps you want. is running.
As this leak comes from an official source, it seems like a pretty sure bet that we’ll soon have a full reveal about AMD’s technology. The teaser clip notes that noise suppression is “available now” towards the end, so with the launch video prepared as such, we imagine something will be received soon.
Analysis: Whatever you can do, we can do better…
What we don’t know, of course, is whether this AI-powered audio cleaning will need specific hardware and one of AMD’s more contemporary GPUs. Nvidia released RTX Voice for Turing GPUs (the last generation before the Ampere RTX 3000) and at launch it was for RTX graphics cards just as the name implies – but it has since worked for GTX cards as well (and has been renamed RTX Voice to become the ‘Noise Removal’ feature in the Nvidia Broadcast app).
We expect AMD to look to broadly apply this technology, as Nvidia has made it available for GTX models (and clearly the AI in this case doesn’t require the specialized Tensor Cores found on RTX GPUs). AMD’s philosophy with FSR, their upscaling technology, has been to make sure it works with older graphics cards compared to DLSS, so we’d expect this to apply equally on the audio front.
Whatever the case, this is good news for AMD graphics card owners, considering we’re big fans of Nvidia’s RTX Voice (or Noise Removal). It’s very effective at dealing with background noise and distractions, so we’d expect AMD to be able to achieve similar results with what looks like a similar AI-powered method (although the early incarnation may need ongoing tweaking, as usual).
It’s also interesting to see that AI may be becoming more and more part of AMD’s arsenal of tools. Not only is it apparently set to be introduced for this audio trick, but rumor has it that the plan will be to outfit the FSR with AI cuts eventually (perhaps with version 3.0).
This is despite some pretty vehement arguments from AMD that machine learning isn’t necessary to make a good upscaling solution (because, as you probably know, Team Red’s current FSR 2.0 doesn’t utilize AI – and to be fair, the second-gen framerate booster results are still great).