NVIDIA Shows How Generative AI Can Be Integrated Into Video Games, Reveals ‘ACE’ Model

Artificial Intelligence has become the buzzword this year—with generative AI bots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Baidu’s Ernie bot dominating the headlines. However, NVIDIA—which recently touched the $1 trillion market cap—has now integrated generative AI into a gaming demo it showcased at Computex 2023.

Called the Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE), NVIDIA’s latest generative AI model will allow players to interact with non-player characters (NPCs) naturally and even get contextually-relevant replies. NVIDIA’s demo, Kairos, showed a user-controlled character interacting with an NPC Jin in a setting that looks a lot like Cyberpunk 2077. The demo was running on the Unreal Engine 5, with ray-tracing and NVIDIA DLSS. The company says that this essentially “sparks life into virtual characters.”

NVIDIA’s ACE technology can run on both cloud and offline on NVIDIA hardware, and while we don’t have a clear window as to when can we expect this technology making its way into publicly available games, it is technology—that on paper—looks promising for world building and especially in genres like RPGs, where creating dialogues and voice acting for hundreds of characters is unrealistic.

Imagine games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, but with NPCs that interact with the player, or in games like Pokemon, where most NPCs interact using pre-fed dialogues.

In theory, this should open up a myriad of possibilities for a virtual world full of NPCs that are dynamic in nature. Moreover, the company has revealed that game developers and startups, including GSC Game World (developer of S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2) and Fallen Leaf are already using NVIDIA generative AI technology as a part of their workflow.

“Generative AI has the potential to revolutionize the interactivity players can have 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 spearheading the use of generative AI in games,” John Spitzer, VP, developer and performance technology at Nvidia, said.