RTX Voice: What It Was, and What to Run Now

RTX Voice is the legacy product. NVIDIA folded that job into NVIDIA Broadcast, and Broadcast is what you install today if your card is an RTX 2060 or better with 8 GB, on Windows. The only people still hunting down RTX Voice are GTX owners, and that path is unsupported. That is the short answer. The rest of this page covers what RTX Voice was doing to your microphone, why the successor exists, what to run on a GTX card, an AMD card or a Mac, and how to measure the cost on your own rig. If you are sitting on a GTX 1060 with a keyboard louder than your voice, you are in the awkward middle: too old for Broadcast, too loud to leave the mic raw.

What RTX Voice was doing, and why Broadcast replaced it

RTX Voice belonged to the same family as Broadcast: a filter that sits between your microphone and every app that listens to one. Windows sees a new input device. You select that device inside Discord or OBS instead of your physical mic, and what reaches your friends has had the keyboard clatter and the fan whine taken out of it on the way through. The defining choice is where the work happens. NVIDIA's tools do it on the GPU, which is the same card your game is already leaning on.

• The processing lives on the GPU, so it competes with whatever your game is already asking the card to do.
• Broadcast is the supported successor and the one that still gets updates.
• Broadcast wants an RTX 2060 or better with 8 GB, and it is Windows only.
• Neither one is a Mac option, and neither one is an AMD option.

So if your card qualifies, the decision is already made: install Broadcast and stop reading forum threads from 2020. Our setup walkthrough has the click path once the installer is down, and our shorter RTX Voice reference page covers the legacy app on its own terms. This page does the part those two do not, which is deciding what to run when the answer is not Broadcast at all. That is a bigger group than NVIDIA's marketing suggests, because a gaming PC lasts longer than a product line does.

The GTX question, answered honestly

GTX owners keep finding threads promising that an old RTX Voice installer still runs on a 1060 or a 1660. Some of those threads are real. All of them are unsupported: NVIDIA does not test that configuration, nothing guarantees the next driver leaves it standing, and the patched installers people pass around are not something we will link to. If it breaks your audio stack the week of a tournament, there is no ticket to file and no version to roll back to.

What to run instead on a GTX card

Two free options, neither of them GPU-bound. Discord's voice settings show a noise suppression control, with a Krisp-branded option sitting next to a standard one; our page on Discord suppression covers what it misses. For a stream, OBS is free and open source and carries a noise suppression filter plus a separate noise gate. And if your card is red rather than green, AMD ships free suppression inside Adrenalin.

The catch with all three: each one is tied to a single app. Discord's toggle does nothing for the call your manager put in your calendar, and an OBS filter only cleans the stream, not what your squad hears in voice chat. Fix a mic once and you would rather it stayed fixed everywhere.

Set up the replacement without donating frames

Start with what you actually own. Windows lists it in Device Manager under display adapters. RTX 2060 or better with 8 GB means Broadcast; anything older means the software route. Either way the install is the easy half, and the part people get wrong comes after it.

The mistake is always the same one. You install the filter, launch Discord, and leave the input set to your physical microphone, so nothing changed and you conclude the app is broken. Every tool here works by adding a virtual input device, and you have to go and select it. If the new device never appears in the list, our Discord mic troubleshooting page starts at the OS permission and works down.

• Play your usual game at your usual settings and log frame times for five minutes with the filter off.
• Turn the filter on, change nothing else, and log the same five minutes on the same map.
• Compare the 1% lows, not the average. That is where a GPU-side filter shows up first.
• Repeat it on a different day before you believe either result.

That protocol is the only honest answer to how much a filter costs you. Your card, your resolution and your background apps all move the number, so a figure from someone else's rig tells you nothing, and we are not going to invent one. The same test works for a CPU-side tool: watch processor usage in Task Manager instead of frame times. Our free stack page lists what combines with what, and the OBS noise suppression guide covers the streaming half.

When it still sounds wrong

The filter is on and people still hear typing

Check that the transmitting app is actually using the virtual device and has not fallen back to the physical mic after a reconnect. Windows loves to reassign defaults when a headset sleeps. If the switches only come through while you are talking, that is speech passing the filter with the keystrokes riding underneath it, and a gate is the layer that catches those.

Your voice sounds underwater

Too much processing, stacked. If Discord's suppression, a GPU filter and your headset's own DSP are all running, they fight each other. Turn everything off, add one layer back, listen to a recording of yourself. Whichever layer turns you into a robot is the one to drop.

It worked yesterday and not today

A driver update or an app update reset the input device. Check that first, because it is the cause more often than any real fault. Reboots get the credit that a dropdown menu deserves.

Questions we get about RTX Voice

Is RTX Voice still available?

Not as a supported product. NVIDIA moved the microphone job into NVIDIA Broadcast, which is the app that gets updates now. Old RTX Voice installers still circulate, and on a GTX card they sometimes run, but nothing about that setup is tested. If your card is an RTX 2060 or better with 8 GB, install Broadcast instead.

RTX Voice vs Krisp: which should I use?

It depends which resource you can spare. NVIDIA's tools run on the GPU, so the cost lands on the card already drawing your game. Krisp runs on the CPU and never asks what graphics card you own, and its free plan covers 60 minutes of noise cancellation a day, verified August 2026. Measure both on your own machine rather than trusting a number from a stranger's rig.

Does RTX Voice work on a GTX card?

Officially, no. Community patches exist and we are not linking them, because they are unsupported and a driver update can break them without warning. If you own a GTX card, use the suppression control in Discord's voice settings for party chat, OBS filters for streaming, or a CPU-based tool that does not care about your GPU at all.

Is NVIDIA Broadcast free?

Yes, free to download and free to use. The price is hardware and headroom: it needs an RTX 2060 or better with 8 GB on Windows, and it spends GPU time while it runs. Whether that matters depends on your game, your settings and your card, which is why the measure-it-yourself protocol above beats any benchmark screenshot you find.

Do I need any of this if my headset already filters noise?

Probably not all of it. Headset DSP, a driver filter and a GPU filter stacked on one signal is how voices start sounding thin and processed. Pick one layer, record thirty seconds of yourself talking and typing, and listen back on headphones. Add a second layer only if the first clearly misses something, and typing under speech is the usual gap.