AMD is apparently working on equipping its Radeon GPUs with noise cancelation chops, in a system that’ll theoretically rival Nvidia’s RTX Voice tech (now renamed by Team Green as ‘Noise Removal’ – more on that later).
Team Red is set to call its take AMD Noise Suppression, and we caught a glimpse of the feature thanks to a video on the company’s official YouTube channel – though that clip was quickly yanked down (or rather, made private) when folks caught wind of it.
Fortunately, as Tom’s Hardware reports, an on-the-ball Redditor (‘crazydaveyboy’) captured and shared the relevant details, and there was even a teaser video on Noise Suppression posted elsewhere on Reddit (and while the post has been removed by mods, the short clip is still visible).
AMD Noise Suppression is, according to these leaked details, designed to allow you to “communicate without distractions” and provides “two-way noise reduction for input and output” that works across “various apps and games”.
Essentially, it’ll clean up the audio using AI (deep learning) in much the same vein as RTX Voice, as mentioned, improving the audio quality of your video chats or streams by, well, suppressing any background noise as the name suggests.
According to the aforementioned Redditor, the feature will sit in the Audio and Video tab in the Radeon Adrenalin driver, and turning it on will install a new virtual audio device (which sounds just like the way RTX Voice works) that you can use in whatever apps you’re running.
As this leak comes from an official source, it seems like a pretty sure bet that before long, we’ll get a full reveal on the tech from AMD. The teaser clip notes that Noise Suppression is “available now” at the end, so with the launch video prepped as such, we’d imagine something will be inbound soon enough.
Analysis: Anything 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 pushed out RTX Voice for Turing GPUs (the last generation before Ampere RTX 3000), and at launch it was for RTX graphics cards only as the name indicated – but since then it works for GTX cards as well (and has been rebranded from RTX Voice to become the ‘Noise Removal’ feature in the Nvidia Broadcast app).
We’d expect AMD will be looking to apply this tech widely, then, given that Nvidia has made it available for GTX models (and clearly the AI in that case doesn’t require the specialized Tensor Cores found on RTX GPUs). AMD’s philosophy with FSR, its upscaling tech, has been to ensure it works with older graphics cards compared to DLSS, so we’d expect that to apply equally on the audio front.
Whatever the case, this is good news for AMD graphics card owners, considering that we’re big fans of Nvidia’s RTX Voice (or Noise Removal, rather). It’s very effective in dealing with background noise and distractions, so we’d hope AMD would be able to achieve similar results with what sounds like a similar AI-powered method (though the initial incarnation may well need ongoing tuning, as ever).
It’s also interesting to see that AI could be increasingly becoming part of AMD’s armory of tools. It’s not just apparently set to be introduced for this audio trickery, but rumor has it that the plan will be to equip FSR with AI chops eventually (maybe with version 3.0).
That’s despite some pretty vehement arguments from AMD that machine learning isn’t needed to make a good upscaling solution (because as you’re likely aware, Team Red’s current FSR 2.0 doesn’t utilize AI – and to be fair, the results from the second-gen frame rate booster are still great).
