Ray tracing and DLSS-compatible titles will be announced at Gamescom 2024. AI-powered NPCs also appear in Mecha Break.

European time on August 20, 2024, NVIDIA made several GeForce-related announcements in conjunction with Europe’s largest gaming event, “gamescom 2024.” Let me give you an overview of the presentation.

NVIDIA RTX and DLSS compatible titles appear one by one

First, let's start with information about the new titles that support ray tracing and NVIDIA's super-resolution technology “DLSS.”
The latest entry in the Dragon Age series, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, is set to release on November 1, and the MMORPG Dune: Awakening will use DLSS 3, ray tracing, and NVIDIA's low-latency 'NVIDIA Reflex' technology. ” and the just-announced Windows version of 'FINAL FANTASY'.

Additionally, while it's not particularly new information, there's also a remastered version of “Half-Life 2” called “Half-Life 2 RTX” and “Star Wars Outlaws” with DLSS 3.5 support and ray tracing announced again.

Comparing Half-Life 2 RTX with ray tracing on (left) and off (right). It looks good even when it's off, but when it's on, the darkness brings out the weird feeling.

In conjunction with this, NVIDIA has started a bundle campaign where you can get a download code for Star Wars Outlaws by purchasing a graphics card or PC with the GeForce RTX 4090/4080/4070 series.
Campaign duration until September 19, 2024.

NVIDIA's AI Character Technology Adopted for 'Mecha Break'

NVIDIA is working on various initiatives to apply AI technology to gaming, one of which is “Nvidia aceExamples of NVIDIA Avatar Cloud Engine (NVIDIA Avatar Cloud Engine) being applied to real-world games are beginning to emerge. One of them is the non-playable character (NPC) in the robotic combat action game “Mecha Break.”

The demo presented by NVIDIA is a technology that combines the company's proprietary generative AI character expression technology “NVIDIA Digital Human” with ACE, which is applied to the non-playable character “Martel” who appears in Mecha Break to interact with the player character. The following technologies are used in this demo: One of the key points is that it uses a “small language model” and a chat model that runs on a computer instead of a cloud server.

• ASR whisper: Automatic speech recognition
• Nemotron-4 4B Instructions: A small language model based chatbot that interacts with players in natural language.
• Voice to Face-3D:Move the 3D model expression according to the sound.
• ElevenLabs TTS SoftwareRead the text data aloud.

By combining these techniques, it is possible to make game characters speak naturally using AI-generated voices instead of pre-recorded ones, and it is also possible to add appropriate representation to their facial expressions.

Demo in Mecha Break. The character on the right is Martel, and his movements and sounds are generated using AI.

In addition, MediaTek, a major SoC (System-on-a-Chip) company, manufactures display controllers compatible with NVIDIA's “G-SYNC” display sync technology, and combining G-SYNC with afterimage reduction technology, Acer, AOC, and ASUSTeK Computer are planning to release “G-SYNC Pulsar” compatible monitors.

The G-SYNC Pulsar compatible displays are 360Hz LCDs, but by combining backlight flicker technology, they are said to be able to produce images as good as 1000Hz, with no afterimages. Esports players who participate in competitive events are likely to benefit.