Nvidia Revolutionizes Games With AI; Wants to Bring Virtual Worlds to Life
Nvidia showed an insanely impressive demo, using AI to generate dynamic interactions between NPCs and the player.
The hottest technological topic of recent months is artificial intelligence. One of the companies benefiting the most from the development of this sector is Nvidia - thanks to its investments in AI, its shares recently reached record levels. The corporation is striking iron while it's hot, and at a presentation ahead of Computex 2023 it unveiled the insanely impressive ACE for Games system, which shows what the future of interaction with NPCs in video games may look like.
- ACE for Games is supposed to be responsible for generating the appearance of characters, making them understand the player's speech, and then creating audio responses and reactions to them.
- You can see what it looks like in action on the recording of the presentation, which we have included below. The technology demo starts at the 27th minute.
The demo is set in a cyberpunk restaurant. The player approaches an NPC standing behind the counter and in his own voice carries on a casual conversation. The NPC, thanks to AI, can give dynamically generated answers to send the player character on a mission at the end.
- The NPC's voice is a bit artificial, but the whole thing is still very impressive, especially considering Nvidia's assurances that there are no scripts in the demo and all interactions were generated by AI.
- For some time now, modders have been experimenting with similar systems (mods of this type are being created for, among others. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord), so it is known that such solutions are possible. Nvidia's demo shows what a professional implementation of such ideas can look like.
- It is not known what system requirements ACE for Games will have. The level of complexity of this system means that it will probably need a lot of computing power. An alternative could be to compute it all in the cloud, although this would result in a requirement for an Internet connection.
It is worth mentioning that games are already being developed that make partial use of this technology. Being part of ACE for Games, the Audio2Face facial animation system will be seen in, among others. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl. It is a matter of time before titles that will make use of all Nvidia's AI solutions appear.
