Video games, regardless of type or genre, contain a 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 until Computex 2023 when Nvidia showed off its first conversational NPC. After almost a year of improvements, Nvidia has finally pulled back the curtains on its first digital human, aka AI NPC, through a demo in the Mecha Break game.
NVIDIA ACE | Mecha BREAK – Digital Human Technologies as seen in the first game
Earlier at GDC and Computex 2024, we learned about AI NPCs in narrative gameplay using RTX computers. We've seen RTX AI computers use large language models for Project G-Assist technology before.
While the previous model used the Nemotron LLM, things have changed now. In the new AI NPC technology announced at 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 be faster. For the Mechabreak game digital human, Nvidia Audio2Face-3D NIM will be used for dynamic facial animation running on the device.
