NVIDIA ACE Brings Generative AI to Gaming Experiences

Our artificial intelligence overlords cannot be stopped and NVIDIA is ready to be a part of the transition to AI-everything.

NVIDIA has launched its Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) for Games. This custom AI model foundry service breathes life into non-playable characters (NPCs) with intelligent natural language interactions, enabled by the advanced capabilities of generative AI.

The unveiling took place at the COMPUTEX event in Taiwan, and the company has made it clear that this innovative development allows middleware, tools, and game developers to construct and implement tailor-made speech, conversation, and animation AI models within their software and games.

“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,” said John Spitzer, the vice president of developer and performance technology at NVIDIA.

ACE for Games, built on NVIDIA Omniverse, offers AI foundation models fine-tuned for speech, conversation, and character animation. NVIDIA NeMo, NVIDIA Riva, and NVIDIA Omniverse Audio2Face are the flagship components that power this new technology.

Demonstrating the future of games, NVIDIA has joined hands with Convai, an NVIDIA Inception startup, to create Kairos. In this neat demo below, players interact with Jin, an NPC who runs a ramen shop. Thanks to generative AI, Jin can respond to natural language queries in a manner that remains true to his narrative backstory.

Check out the demo below:

“With NVIDIA ACE for Games, Convai’s tools can achieve the latency and quality needed to make AI non-playable characters available to nearly every developer in a cost-efficient way,” said Purnendu Mukherjee, founder and CEO at Convai.

The deployment of ACE for Gaming Models is versatile; developers can choose to deploy locally or on NVIDIA DGX Cloud, GeForce RTX PCs, or on-premises for real-time inferencing.

Several game developers and startups have already started leveraging NVIDIA’s generative AI technologies, with GSC Game World, Fallen Leaf, and Charisma.ai among the notable early adopters.

Generative AI will make games even more interactive as more non-playable characters will soon be able to get in on the action too. Developers won’t have to spend an arm and a leg to bring every character to life. Can’t wait to see what comes out of this.

NVIDIA’s stock last week surged 25% and is nearing a $1 trillion valuation, after the company announced the demand for its AI technology is out of control.