AMD today released a new video on its official YouTube channel, which apparently revealed a new feature in its Adrenalin drivers. We say ‘apparently’ as the video was quickly set to private. However, some traces of its contents remain, as well as a few other clues about its subject: ‘AMD Noise Suppression’.
One of the best remnants of the video publishing we have is a post by Redditor u/crazydaveyboy. The Redditor had watched the video before it was swiped from visibility. They said that the video suggests AMD Noise Suppression will be a new setting which will be found under the Audio and Video Tab in the Adrenalin driver.
Once you turn on the AMD Noise Suppression option it will “install a new virtual audio device that you can use in your application,” says u/crazydaveyboy. Apparently, the video informed viewers that AMD Noise Suppression uses AI and deep learning for effective noise suppression.
If that recollection is correct, AMD has cued up a new feature for Radeon video card users to rival the Nvidia’s RTX Voice feature. RTX Voice uses AI to remove unwanted noise from your streams, conference calls and so on – basically any time you will be using a microphone. Despite the name having RTX in it, we learned a little later that RTX Voice worked fine on GTX graphics cards as old as the GTX 600 series, a feature which became official in April 2021. In short, the Tensor cores in RTX GPUs weren’t necessary for the AI noise processing.
It will be interesting to see if AMD’s Noise Suppression requires any particular generation Radeon GPU to work. Two of the first replies to the news on Reddit made it clear they would appreciate this feature on their Polaris GPU graphics cards.
AMD will probably republish the "Elevate Your Audio Experience - AMD Noise Suppression" video soon, perhaps in a few hours, or days, and likely in time with a driver release featuring support for it. While we all wait for the video to remerge, there might be some worthwhile background information to be gleaned about AMD Noise Suppression from a rather technical patent dubbed ‘Detecting voice regions in a non-stationary noisy environment’, published way back in March 2019.
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Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.
There's a couple ways to control background noise. One is gating with cutoff. Another is narrowband filtering.
The approach they are using is to analyze the spectrum using a FFT. Voices and keyboard clicks have very distinct FFT and response curves. The FFT freq resp of a human voice at a distance is different than that of a close up voice which has a more "balanced" approach. A key click has a distinct shape which can determined with vector analysis with minimal delay. You then reshape the waveform once you isolate those elements. But it does require a little sample training to get it correct.
