Testing Nvidia Broadcast 2 0 beta with Studio Voice and Virtual Key Light on RTX 5080

Nvidia Broadcast 2.0 adds several new features, for the RTX 5090 and 5080 at least. It's in open beta, and along with existing functionality like noise cancelation and background removal, there are two new filtering options: Studio Voice for audio, and Virtual Key Light for video. (To clarify: The new filters are in beta; the 2.0 version of the app is readily available.)

Both new filters require a Blackwell RTX 50-series GPU for now, as far as I'm aware, though Nvidia has indicated it plans to eventually support 40-series and perhaps earlier models as well. But things aren't quite ready for a full release, as you'll see in my testing.

Studio Voice is, in my opinion, a complete bust right now. It makes me sound like I'm using a crappy microphone with too much gain, rather than a high-end studio mic! I'm sure this is more of an issue with the current training set, and I could see it getting a lot better really fast with the right tweaks. At present, though, I wouldn't want to use it. (I also tried it on the built-in headset mic, not for this video, and basically came to the same conclusion: It changes your mic capture but not in universally good or sometimes even acceptable ways.)

The video Virtual Key Light is a different story. I like the effect and think it can help make the overall image quality look better. There's a different problem, however: It's far too demanding right now. It pushed GPU utilization up to 80% or more. So, if you're only doing video capture like in my video, it's fine, but it would potentially kill performance in games. Hopefully Nvidia can reduce the hardware requirements so that it only needs about 10~20 percent of an RTX 5080 to run properly in the future.