What is Nvidia ACE?

ACE stands for Avatar Cloud Engine and is set to revolutionize gaming

Shaun Conroy

GPU

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AI is ushering in a new era of innovation for several aspects of our lives. Nvidia ACE (Avatar Cloud Engine) is the latest AI development set to revolutionize the gaming space. Nvidia recently showcased what ACE can do for developers of middleware, tools, and games. ACE can easily allow games to build and utilize customized speech, conversation, and animation AI models. Generative AI is all over the place and can slot into character design without any fuss, giving players an interactivity never seen before.

Think about it, a designer can create a full back story and persona for a character and input that data into the software. This in turn will determine the characters responses and how they interact with players, allowing for unique in-game moments that can only add to the overall immersion.

Nvidia ACE capabilities

Nvidia has made it clear that AI is going to hold a major part in the future of video games and it is easy to see why. As our games become more complex, with bigger maps, and greater need for better NPCs in vast, seemingly limitless worlds, a tool to help with the load sounds pretty useful.

Nvidia ACE can recognize speech, it can do text to speech, it can understand natural language much like LLMs. Furthermore, ACE can use sound to animate a face or use sound to animate gestures, making character design much much simpler.

Developers can access this service and modify the pre-trained models for their own applications/ games. These can then be deployed in the cloud or moved to a device.

• Nvidia NeMo – Tool for building, customizing, and deploying language models using data. The LLMs can be customized with character back stories while being protected against counterproductive or unsafe conversions.
• Nvidia Riva – Tool for automatic speech recognition and text to speech, enabling live conversations at the drop of a hat.
• Nvidia Audio2Face – Tool for creating facial animations that match a speech track.

Benefits of Nvidia ACE

The main benefit is game enhancement. No longer will NPCs have dire dialogue, at least there will be a certain level of quality running through games. We agree that this would be an absurd tool to use for main characters of any story, however, for the characters running around in the background, its a a clear game changer.

The addition of animation based on sounds is another huge benefit. AI generated characters will be able to interact with more than one another or players but also in-game events flawlessly.

The above “Kairos” demo was shown at Computex showcasing RTX rendering tech and ACE. Nvidia collaborated with Convai, an Nvidia Inception startup to bring this new development to life.

The characters are given a back story however, how they interact through natural language queries, all coming from generative AI.

Game developers are already starting to use Nvidia generative AI technologies in workflows, with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl adopting Audio2Face this year.