NVIDIA’s AI demo including ray-tracing and NVIDIA DLSS. (Image: Nvidia)
NVIDIA has introduced ACE for Games, a generative AI model that can be integrated into games, essentially “breathing life into virtual characters.” The demo was showcased at Computex 2023.
Artificial intelligence has become a hot topic this year – generative AI bots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google Bard and Baidu’s Ernie bot are in the limelight. However, NVIDIA—which recently touched a $1 trillion market cap—has now integrated generative AI into a gaming demo, which was showcased at Computex 2023.
Called the Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE), NVIDIA’s latest generative AI model will allow players to naturally interact with non-player characters (NPCs) and even receive context-relevant answers. NVIDIA’s demo, Kairos, showed a user-controlled character interacting with NPC Jin in a setting that looks a lot like Cyberpunk 2077. The demo was running on Unreal Engine 5 with ray-tracing and NVIDIA DLSS. The company says it essentially “brings life to virtual characters.”
NVIDIA’s ACE technology can run on NVIDIA hardware both in the cloud and offline, and while we don’t have a clear window on when we can expect this technology to make its way into publicly available games, it’s technology—which On paper – looks promising for worldbuilding and especially in genres like RPGs, where it’s unrealistic to have dialogue and voice acting for hundreds of characters.
Imagine games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, but with NPCs that interact with the player, or games like Pokémon, where most NPCs interact using pre-fed dialogue.
In theory, this should open up myriad possibilities for a virtual world filled with NPCs that are dynamic in nature. In addition, the company has revealed that gAme developers and startups, including GSC Game World (developer of STALKER 2) and Fallen Leaf, are already using NVIDIA Generative AI technology as a part of their workflow.
“Generative AI has the potential to revolutionize player interactivity with game characters and dramatically increase immersion in games. Building on our expertise in AI and decades of experience working with game developers, Nvidia is pioneering the use of generative AI in games,” said John Spitzer, VP, developer and performance technology at Nvidia.
