Nvidia announces RTX Broadcast Engine, using tensor cores to enhance live streams

At TwitchCon this week Nvidia will be showcasing its next-generation streaming enhancements, labelled as the Nvidia RTX Broadcast engine, which can add real-time effects such as virtual green screen, style filters and augmented reality elements.

Nvidia has developed a way to enable their RTX graphics cards to make use of new features for streamers. The software dubbed RTX Broadcast engine leverages the tensor cores found in Nvidia’s Turning GPUs to provide real-time visual enhancements for streamers. With improvements in the NVENC codec, this shouldn’t come with too much of a performance hit either, ensuring gameplay, capture and streaming can all be handled by a single PC.

As implied by the name, an Nvidia RTX graphics card will be required to take advantage of these new features. The new SDK’s enable virtual green screen backgrounds, style filters and augmented reality – the kind of techniques used by large broadcast networks, so these tools should give live streamers a more professional look.

Currently, over 750 million people around the world tune in to watch live streaming. With live streaming becoming extremely popular, this should help amateur streamers improve their production values, making them look more professional and hopefully attracting more viewers.

RTX Green Screen delivers a real-time background removal of your webcam feed, meaning only your face and body will show on your live stream. RTX Green Screen can automatically recognise a human outline, so with RTX backgrounds, streamers should be able to get away with not having a traditional green screen.

RTX AR can detect faces, track facial features and even model the surface of the face, which enables real-time augmented reality effects using your standard webcam. RTX AR has the potential for developers to create fun and engaging AR effects such as overlaying 3D content on a face or allowing a person to control a character with their face.

Another feature of Nvidia RTX Broadcast engine is RTX Style Filters. With this, streamers can use an AI technique to transform the look and feel of their webcam feed, based on the style of a separate image. Using a hotkey, streamers can style their stream feed with any of their favourite images or game art.

Nvidia is said to be teaming up with the popular video capture and live streaming application OBS, to integrate RTX Green Screen functions into its software. Streamers will be able to change their background in OBS with RTX Green Screen once the technology is implemented in OBS in the coming months. This feature is due to be shown at TwitchCon 2019 for the first time this weekend.

KitGuru says: This is great news for amateur streamers who want to make their broadcast look as good as the pro’s. Are you a newcomer to live-streaming? Are you looking forward to trying out this new software from Nvidia?

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