Nvidia Unveils AI-Powered Tech That Could Automate Many Aspects Of Game Development

Many major players in the video game industry have embraced the possibilities of generative AI, especially the technology has grown more mainstream in recent months. At a keynote earlier this month, Nvidia unveiled a suite of AI-powered tools for creating NPCs that it's calling Nvidia Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE). Described as a "custom AI model foundry service," the company says that ACE has the potential to revolutionize how NPCs are created.

The suite of tools includes Nvidia NeMo, which uses a large language model to generate text and dialogue similar to publicly-available tools like ChatGPT. Nvidia Riva is a service that uses automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech tech to "enable live speech conversation with Nvidia NeMo." It also has Nvidia Omniverse Audio2Face, which creates facial animation for game characters from an audio source. The suite is also easily connected to Unreal Engine 5.

The above demo shows off the capabilities of the technology. As a whole, it seems to be in a rather early stage, but it indicates what could be possible in the coming years. Nvidia said in its presentation that Audio2Face is already being used by major game studios, including STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl developer GSC Game World.

AI has become a controversial topic in the world of game making, as developers worry that AI tech could be used to displace junior workers who perform low-level tasks, or justify mass layoffs in order to appease shareholders. For example, the New York Times recently reported that Blizzard plans to show off an AI image generator to its staff sometime this year.

However, while the hype for the tech is certainly on the upswing, not everyone is convinced it will revolutionize the field. In a recent call, Take-Two's CEO Strauss Zelnick said that AI can make coding easier for everyone, but it's not a "magic trick" that can make a hit game for you.