First introduced at Computex 2023, Nvidia showed off its Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) together with NeMo SteerLM at last year's Gamescom event. Today, at Gamescom 2024, the company is announcing a Nemotron-4 4B Instruct small language model (SLM)that works with ACE to enhance non-playable character (NPC) interactivity in games.

Nemotron-4 is a 4 billion parameter on-device SLM that enables more interactive role-play and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and function calling. Nemotron-4 allows NPCs to interact with player characters, respond with a personal approach, and perform accurate actions.

This SLM is part of Nvidia'a ACE suite of digital human technologies that uses generative AI to power speech, intelligence, and animation in in-game characters. Developers can also leverage Nemotron-4 via Nvidia NIM, a set of cloud-native microservices that accelerates deployment of generative AI models across the cloud, datacenter, and on-device.

Mecha Breakby Amazing Seasun Games is one of the first games to make use of Nvidia ACE and the Nemotron-4B Instruct NIM running on-device and is currently being demoed at Gamescom 2024. Mecha Break uses several AI technologies including Nvidia Audio2Face-3D NIM and OpenAI's Whisper to provide on-device facial animation and speech recognition, with the character's voice powered via the cloud by ElevenLabs.

The ACE-powered NPC guides players on choosing the right mechanized robots (mechs) that suit their play style, helps with appearance, and even gives advice on preparing for major battles.

New RTX 4070 GPU announced with GDDR6 VRAM

Additionally, Nvidia is also introducing a minor refresh of the GeForce RTX 4070 GPU with GDDR6 VRAM citing "strong demand". It may be recalled that Nvidia did not discontinue the original RTX 4070 even after announcing the RTX 4070 Superrefresh earlier this year.

Both the RTX 4070 and the RTX 4070 Super (US$599.99 on Best Buy) use GDDR6X VRAM with a 192-bit 21 Gbps bus and a 540 GB/s memory bandwidth. The move to GDDR6 brings the memory specs down to 192-bit 20 Gbps and 480 GB/s bandwidth.

Nvidia isn't exactly detailing the effects of moving to GDDR6 in real-world gaming. In fact, Nvidia and partners are doing this quite discretely, and you will probably not even notice this on retail packaging. There was no mention of an impending RTX 4070 GDDR6 variant during the company's pre-Gamescom media briefing either.

The rest of the specifications of the GPU are the same, and Nvidia claims "similar" performance in games and applications. We expect no pricing changes between these two variants.

The latest 560.94 Game Ready Driver released today provides launch day support for the new RTX 4070 GDDR6 along with day 1 support for new games including Black Myth: Wukong, Star Wars Outlaws, Final Fantasy XVI demo, and Concord.