- At CES 2026, Nvidia revealed new advancements in its ‘ACE’ gaming AI technology
- Team Green claims 2026 will be the year we properly see AI-powered guides and teammates in games
- However, it seems that we are still a long way from this technology being widely implemented.
At CES 2026 in Las Vegas, Nvidia had a lot to talk about. The reveal of DLSS 4.5 was the headline news, with the arrival of a new generation of 6X frames to boost frame rates to even more ridiculously high numbers. We also saw new display technology, updates to the GeForce Now cloud gaming service, and, as expected, a lot of AI elements.
I’ll be honest: I skimmed through some of the AI-related announcements shown at Nvidia’s keynote last week. A good part of it isn’t really my thing; Building LLM and generative video models is the territory of my colleague Graham Barlow and the TechRadar AI team.
But there was one section that immediately piqued my interest, and not just because it was something I was already familiar with. When Nvidia starts talking about their ACE technology, I always listen, but I don’t always like what I hear.
Ace in the hole
For the uninitiated, Nvidia ACE is a framework for creating fully AI-powered non-player characters (NPCs) in games. It’s only been theoretical so far (Nvidia can’t force developers to use it, after all), but its few appearances have been pretty impressive. In fact, it outperformed me when I tried to alter it in a tech demo in 2024.
Now, Nvidia is moving forward with bold plans for ACE. These LLM-powered NPCs will no longer be limited to tech demos; At CES, Nvidia showed off several new use cases for ACE, including a gamer assistant for Total war and fully AI-powered teammates in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. ACE is also being implemented in Korean developer WeMade’s upcoming project. MIR5 to drive a ‘learning boss battle’ and to create dynamic interrogations in the murder mystery title dead meat.
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, implementing AI technology like ACE specifically to make games more challenging and engaging is a potentially interesting use case. To be clear, I am No endorsing MIR5 overall here, because I was disappointed to learn that it’s NFT blockchain garbage that has no place in games; but the general concept of an evolving boss fight that learns from your encounters and adjusts its behavior accordingly is solid. Just don’t tell that to WeMade Foreigner: Isolation Indeed it did so years before modern generative AI made its meteoric debut…
On the other hand, some of these ACE ideas are just… completely antithetical to the goals of games as an art form and entertainment. dead meat It doesn’t take you on a lovingly crafted narrative journey; basically, it is outsourcing the dialogue to a chatbot. Krafton’s ‘Co-Player Characters’ in PUBG They’re not a revelation for multiplayer games – they’re just glorified robots, which frankly defeat the purpose of playing a competitive online game like PUBG first of all.
With great power comes great responsibility
Nvidia might be the creator of ACE, but of course it’s fundamentally up to individual developers when it comes to how it’s actually used in games. So it’s fair to say I’m more frustrated with companies like Krafton right now; I’m sorry, but the ‘coplayer character’ thing is absolutely walnuts. Personally, I would be furious if I found out that the person who just killed me in a multiplayer game was actually someone’s AI ally, not a real player who beat me with their own skill.
“But Christian!” I hear AI advocates shout, “What if someone doesn’t have friends to play squad games like PUBG with?” And to that I say: cry, losers. It’s literally never been easier to find a community to play games online. Get your asses on Reddit or Discord. If I’m playing a multiplayer game, I want it to be with other real human beings, dammit!
The ‘Pharaoh’ advisor to ACE for Total war It’s frustrating, but for different reasons. The demo video essentially shows him giving step-by-step advice on how to play, making the smartest recommendations possible to ensure victory. “Depth and complexity are hallmarks of PC gaming,” proclaimed one of the slides in Nvidia’s CES presentation, except that Pharaoh’s advisor effectively removes that depth and complexity by explaining everything to the player.
you don’t have Obviously, you have to follow their advice, and Nvidia maintains that it’s a useful tool for new players who aren’t familiar with the strategy genre, but come on: figuring things out through trial and error and slowly improving as you learn how a game works is literally part of the experience. By removing that, you’re essentially removing the fun of mastering a game yourself.
Hardware needs
Of course, there is another problem with the implementation of ACE in games. Nvidia defends it as an example of on-device AI, meaning it runs locally on your hardware, ideally an Nvidia RTX 5000 series GPU. I don’t think local AI is inherently bad; In general, it is better to run AI models locally whenever possible, as it is safer and reduces the load on data centers (which are becoming a real problem for gamers right now).
But if we start locking actual game elements behind specific hardware requirements, that’s a bridge too far for me. Graphics and performance are one thing; People may complain that tools like DLSS and Multi Frame Generation are exclusive to Nvidia’s newest hardware, but PC gaming has always been that way. If you have newer hardware, your games will look better.
They shouldn’t play better, however. If I need a next-gen graphics card to get the full experience of a game, I simply won’t buy that game. I actually have an RTX 5070 on my desktop, but it’s the principle that matters; And a terrible irony is that AI currently makes it harder than ever to buy a new graphics card at a reasonable price.
Still, control ultimately lies with the developers, so I’m not panicking. also There’s a lot about Nvidia ACE leaking into more projects. I recently spoke to Nvidia’s PR about my concerns with ACE, and they raised the excellent point that it’s just another string to the bow of game developers; Like ray tracing, motion controls, and even 3D graphics before it, there will still be fantastic gaming experiences created without AI, and there’s no guarantee that ACE will end up being as popular with developers. When I interviewed ‘GeForce evangelist’ Jacob Freeman about the technology in 2024, he acknowledged that in some cases, implementing ACE was actually further Work for developers to simply write a script for a conventional NPC.
And after all, one of the biggest releases of 2025 was Hollow Knight: Silk Songa game made by three guys that has virtually none of the fancy “innovations” of modern games. The development landscape could change, but these games are not going to disappear, no matter how much the technology industry tries to impose AI on us.
