Video games, no matter the type or genre, contain one common element called an NPC. For a long time, these NPCs have been a part of our games but never felt more than what they were. That was in until Computex 2023 when Nvidia showcased its first conversational NPC. After almost a year of improvements, Nvidia has finally taken the curtains off its first digital human, aka AI NPC, through a demo inside the Mecha Break game.
Nvidia ACE: How It Works and Brings NPCs to Life
Earlier in GDC and Computex 2024, we learned about the AI NPC in narrative gameplay using RTX PCs. We have seen RTX AI PCs using large language models for Project G-Assist technology before.
While the previous model used Nemotron LLM, things have changed now. In the new AI NPC tech announced in Gamescom 2024, Nvidia uses the first small language model for game characters, the NVIDIA Nemotron-4 4B Instruct.
According to Nvidia, this new language model will make conversations better and the response time will also get faster. For the Mechabreak game digital human, Nvidia Audio2Face-3D NIM will be used for dynamic facial animation running on-device.
Furthermore, third-party models from Whisper by OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, will provide speech recognition and Elevenlabs will provide realistic voices running in the cloud.
Once the microservices do their job, they will send the output through Unreal Engine 5, Omniverse RTX, and Custom Renderer. This will be reflected through the voice and visuals presented by the digital human. As ACE will use a SLM, it will also reduce the VRAM cost of your GPU.
Things a Digital Human NPC Can Do: Mecha Break Demo
While testing the waters at Gamescom 2024, Nvidia demoed its digital human in Mecha Break, and it was ground-breaking. For starters, you can ask the AI NPC what is your next mission in the game, mechs to use, or strategies.
You will get answers within the blink of an eye. Nvidia says its new AI model is just that responsive. Moreover, it will also help you in selecting the weapon or Striker you want to use. Furthermore, get your Striker a paint job only through voice conversation as well.
This shows that Nvidia ACE has developed the NPC to react to voice effortlessly. It also makes your life easier in a game where you will not have to spend hours behind finding certain things. You can also have casual conversations with the NPC as it holds a vast amount of knowledge embedded in it.
That said, I am pretty excited to see this new Nvidia AI NPC arriving in more future games. Are you excited about such NPCs in video games? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
