GDC 2024 has already left us with some interesting announcements and demos that, as it could not be otherwise, are deeply associated with AI. A few months ago, NVIDIA confirmed an important commitment to improve the level of realism of NPCs in games with ACE, a technology that is gradually improving, complemented by NVIDIA NeMo and NVIDIA RTX.

These three NVIDIA technologies have opened a new era that allows developers to create NPCs and avatars that are not only much more realistic, but also They are able to communicate with us much more naturally, maintaining humanized conversations and interactions that would not be possible without the support of artificial intelligence. Along these lines, John Spitzer, vice president of development and performance technologies at NVIDIA, stated:

“NVIDIA offers developers a set of cutting-edge AI technologies for creating digital humans. These technologies can power the complex animations and conversational speech required for digital interaction look real«.

If we talk about the games, it’s clear that the NPC has been in need of major improvements for years, as it has remained almost unchanged for a long time. The limitations this entails are evident and ultimately every time we meet the game’s NPCs We feel that they are nothing more than mere “bots” with a few pre-recorded phrases this will be repeated to us again and again. They have no “life” and we can hardly interact with them, which takes away from the game’s interest and realism.

NVIDIA ACE to the rescue: realistic and humanized NPCs

This kit integrates a set of technologies that enable developers to carry out the process of digitizing human beings using cutting-edge tools such as NVIDIA Audio2Facewhich allows creating high-quality facial animations, and NVIDIA Riva, which is an automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech technology.

We’ve already seen what NVIDIA ACE can do in the Covert Protocol demo created by Inworld AI in collaboration with NVIDIA. That demo is spectacular because exceeded the classic limits of interactions with NPCs, and pushed them to a level that would have seemed impossible to us just a few months ago. The Indoworld AI engine integrated NVIDA Riva to achieve a high degree of speech-to-text accuracy and also used NVIDIA Audio2Face to improve facial animations.

Powered by artificial intelligence and NVIDIA ACE technologies, these NPCs allow us to offer multimodal interactionand they behave much more realistically thanks to their high level of cognition and perception, which together add a layer of realism that will define next-generation games. Kylan Gibbs, CEO of Inworld AI, said:

“The combination of NVIDIA ACE microservices and the Inworld Engine enables developers to create digital characters that can do just that drive dynamic storiesthus opening up new possibilities for players to decipher, deduce and play.”

NVIDIA ACE counts today with the support of large companies and developersamong which we can highlight names of the caliber of Convai, Cyber​​​​​​Agent, Data Monsters, Deloitte, Hippocratic AI, IGOODI, Inworld AI, Media.Monks, miHoYo, NetEase Games, Perfect World, Openstream, OurPalm, Quantiphi, Rakuten Securities, Slalom, SoftServe, Tencent, Top Health Tech, Ubisoft, UneeQ and Unions Avatars.

But that’s not all, the green giant has not forgotten the professional sector either. NVIDIA NeMo is an end-to-end platform that enables developers to deliver AI-based generative models with accurate data processing, highly advanced generation of personalization with increased refresh and improved performance through hardware acceleration. This translates to in short much more realistic avatars.

NVIDIA RTX It is also an important part of this ecosystem, as it allows the use of a whole set of technologies associated with ray tracing, such as RTX Global Illumination and DLSS 3.5. With this platform, it is possible to implement path tracking in games and use the potential of hardware-accelerated artificial intelligence to improve performance.