- At CES 2026, Nvidia unveiled new advances in its ‘ACE’ in-game AI technology
- Team Green claims that 2026 will be the year we see AI-powered guides and teammates in games
- However, it seems that we are still far from this technology being widely implemented
At CES 2026 in Las Vegas, Nvidia had a lot to talk about. The unveiling of DLSS 4.5 was the main news, with a new 6X frame generation coming to boost framerates to even more ridiculously high numbers. We also saw new display technology, upgrades to the GeForce Now cloud gaming service and, unsurprisingly, a whole host of AI stuff.
I’ll be honest – I skimmed past some of the AI-related announcements shown in Nvidia’s presentation last week. A decent chunk of it isn’t really my ballpark; LLM building 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 already knew. When Nvidia starts talking about its 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 mostly been a theoretical thing so far – after all, Nvidia can’t force developers to use it – but its few appearances have been pretty impressive. In fact, it surprised me when I tried messing with it in a tech demo back in 2024.
Now Nvidia is plowing ahead with bold plans for ACE. These LLM-powered NPCs will no longer be limited to tech demos; at CES, Nvidia showed several new use cases for ACE, including a player assistant for Total war and fully AI-powered teammates i PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. ACE is also being implemented in Korean developer WeMade’s upcoming MIR5 to drive a ‘learning boss battle’ and 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 not approve MIR5 generally here because I was disappointed to learn that it’s NFT blockchain garbage that has no place in gaming; but the general concept of an evolving boss fight that learns from your encounters and adapts its behavior accordingly is solid. Just don’t tell WeMade Alien: Isolation did so effectively 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 a form of art and entertainment. Dead meat doesn’t take you on a lovingly crafted narrative journey – it’s basically outsourcing the dialogue to a chatbot. Krafton’s ‘Co-Player Characters’ i PUBG aren’t a revelation for multiplayer games – they’re just glorified bots that frankly defeat the purpose of playing a competitive online game like PUBG in the first instance.
With great power comes great responsibility
Nvidia may be the creator of ACE, but of course it’s basically 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 – sorry, but the ‘Co-Player Character’ thing is absolutely nuts. Personally, I’d 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 beating me with their own abilities.
“But Christian!” I hear the AI excuses cry, “What if someone doesn’t have friends to play team based games like. PUBG with?” And to that I say, cry me a river, you losers. It’s literally never been easier to find a community to play online games. Get your ass on Reddit or Discord. If I’m going to play a multiplayer game, I want it to be with other real people, dammit!
‘Pharaoh’ the ACE advisor for Total war is frustrating, but for different reasons. The demo video essentially shows that it gives step-by-step advice on how to play the game and gives the smartest possible recommendations to ensure victory. “Depth and complexity are hallmarks of PC gaming,” proclaimed one of the slides in Nvidia’s CES presentation—except that Pharaoh Advisor effectively removes that depth and complexity by spelling everything out for the player.
You don’t have to follow its advice, of course, and Nvidia claims it’s a useful tool for new players unfamiliar 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 it, you are essentially removing the fun of mastering a game yourself.
Hardware needs
Of course, there is another problem with ACE being implemented in games. Nvidia champions it as an example of on-device AI, meaning it runs locally on your hardware — ideally an RTX 5000 series GPU from Nvidia. I don’t think local AI is inherently evil; it’s generally better to run AI models locally where possible, as it’s safer and reduces the load on data centers (which is becoming a real problem for gamers right now).
But if we start locking actual gameplay elements behind specific hardware requirements, that’s a bridge too far for me. Graphics and performance are one thing; people might complain about tools like DLSS and Multi Frame Generation being exclusive to newer Nvidia hardware, but PC gaming has always been like that. If you have newer hardware, your games will look better.
They shouldn’t game better, though. If I need a next-gen graphics card to get the full experience of a game, I just don’t buy that game. I actually have an RTX 5070 in my desktop rig, but it’s the principle that matters; and a terrible irony here is that AI is currently making it harder than ever to buy a new graphics card at a reasonable price.
Still, control ultimately rests with the developers, which is why I’m not panicking also much about Nvidia ACE seeping into multiple projects. I spoke to Nvidia’s PR recently about my concerns with ACE, and they raised the excellent point that it’s simply another string for game developers; like ray-tracing, motion controls, and even 3D graphics before it, there will still be great gaming experiences built without AI, and there’s no guarantee that ACE will even end up being that popular with developers. When I interviewed ‘GeForce Evangelist’ Jacob Freeman about the technology back in 2024, he acknowledged that implementing ACE in some cases was actually more work for developers than just scripting a conventional NPC.
And after all, was one of the biggest releases of 2025 Hollow Knight: Silk Songa game made by three guys with practically none of the fancy ‘innovations’ of modern games. The development landscape may change, but these games aren’t going away—no matter how much the tech industry tries to force AI on us.
