5 (free) ways NVIDIA RTX can speed up your creative software

If you’re taking your first steps into content creation, then no doubt you’ve wondered what hardware is best. You might be generating content for YouTube and social media or creating design work for clients. Whatever it is, there is a wide array of NVIDIA RTX-powered tools that can not only speed up your workflow but also improve your output.

There are some big wins to embracing NVIDIA RTX-powered tools, especially if you’re creating ‘to-camera' video content in a studio style. To maximise viewer engagement, this setup requires great lighting, fantastic audio, and subtitles. Nailing these elements can take time, energy, and a whole lot of money. But with NVIDIA RTX technology and AI, it’s possible to elevate the quality of your content with just a few simple tools.

I’ve put together five different ways that you can use NVIDIA RTX cards to supercharge your creative work. These approaches utilise a range of different types of software, including NVIDIA Broadcast, OBS Studio, and DaVinci Resolve. Every application mentioned below is 100% free, so you can take advantage of them without any upfront costs whatsoever. Game on.

1. Boost your video output

With the advancement of smartphone hardware, the reality is that most of us can use that black mirror inside our pocket to generate a reasonable quality of video. Using a phone is not only quick, easy, and familiar, but it also doesn’t require any extra financial investment, which is ideal for anyone giving content creation a go for the very first time.

With a rudimentary quality video feed, you can use NVIDIA Broadcast to make improvements, tweaks, and changes, all in real-time. One of my favourite features is the software’s ability to correct where your eyes are looking. Broadcast can use its AI skills to automatically make adjustments. It’s a little creepy to think about but super helpful for avoiding a reshoot.

2. Elevate your audio to professional standards

As well as rectifying and improving video feeds, it’s equally important to give attention to your audio output. If your audio is noisy, full of distractions, and unclear, then a viewer might switch the video off completely. Thankfully, with Broadcast, even amateurs can get outstanding results.

With the click of a button it’s possible to remove background noise, remove echo, and enhance the talent’s voice so it sounds like it’s been recorded in a studio. Heck, it’s even possible to remove pet noise so that dog barking in the other room is no longer a problem!

3. Encode like a pro

When I first started creating and streaming videos, I didn’t give much thought to encoding. I obviously had to do it, but more often than not I just picked the default settings and left it at that.

That’s all well and good, but things have moved on, and there are a lot more gains to be had, especially if you have an NVIDIA RTX GPU. Thanks to NVENC, NVIDIA’s encoder built inside OBS, it’s possible to encode videos while maximising quality and reduce file sizes.

The bottom line is that NVENC “lets you capture and stream content without impacting GPU or CPU performance. Newer generations of NVIDIA RTX GPUs include support for newer, more efficient codecs.”

NVENC is integrated into the heart of OBS, a free and open-source software for video recording and live streaming. So, if you want some of the very best encoding tools and own an NVIDIA RTX GPU, OBS is the software to choose.

4. Object tracking for fun

Because of the latest video camera and phone camera stabilisers and gimbals, I’ve not had to perform too much object tracking and stabilisation, but if I did, then I’d be turning to DaVinci Resolve.

Thanks to its IntelliTrack AI point tracker, it’s possible to perform advanced auto tracking without needing to set any manual tracking points. This tool is able to handle complex tracking scenarios, but whatever you throw at it, you can be sure that it’ll save you time.

According to NVIDIA, “IntelliTrack gets a big boost when running on NVIDIA RTX PCs and workstations because TensorRT lets them run up to 3x faster on a GeForce GTX 4090 laptop vs. the MacBook Pro M3 Max.”

IntelliTrack AI can also be used in Resolve’s Fairlight tool to “track on-screen subjects and automatically generate audio panning within a scene by tracking people or objects as they move across 2D and 3D spaces."

5. Reduce visual noise

I’ve long been a fan of Topaz Photo AI 3 for noise reduction and have extensive hands-on experience with the software. Topaz also produces an application called Video AI, which delivers a similar set of features but for, you guessed it, video rather than photos.

But if you want outstanding noise reduction for free, then DaVinci Resolve is the software to turn to. The feature is called 'Ultra NR', and it uses AI for spatial noise reduction. Impressively, if you run it on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 card, then it’ll perform three times faster than the Apple Mac M2 Ultra.

Ultra NR excels when it comes to removing “undesired fluctuations of colour or luminance that obscure detail while maintaining image clarity”. And if you’d like to further improve your output, combine it with temporal noise reduction in images with lots of motion.

What is stopping you?

You’ll need an NVIDIA RTX GPU to take advantage of most of the features discussed in this article, but if you already own one, then giving these tools a go is a bit of a no-brainer. Or, if you like the idea of transforming your creative workflow with AI tools, then it could be financially more beneficial to invest in a PC with an RTX card rather than setting up a fully fledged studio.