- PUBG’s Ally Duo mode is now in testing on Steam
- Nvidia’s ACE technology powers the AI teammates in this mode
- You can play with an AI teammate against other human + AI duos until the end of June
PUBG Battlegrounds now offers the ability to play with an AI teammate – powered by Nvidia – in a new mode available to try in beta for the next two weeks.
As VideoCardz noted, Ally Duo Mode is now available through PUBG Arcade, and represents Krafton and Nvidia teaming up to use Team Green’s ACE technology — which shipped back at the start of the year — to create an AI teammate called Ella.
PUBG Ally was in testing early in 2026 and has now reached the point where it is ready for public consumption – at least as a beta, with the mode being playable until the end of June on Steam.
This is an opportunity to “gather invaluable real-world player feedback to guide the future of AI agents in games,” Nvidia says.
How exactly does Ella work? The best way to find out is to watch the demo in the YouTube video below.
As you can see, the idea is that you have an AI teammate you can talk to, and more to the point, give orders or ask for help using natural spoken language (or written text if you prefer), with responses from the AI designed to be appropriately ‘human’ in feel and tone.
At least that’s the idea here, but watching the short demo leaves me with a lot of doubts about what “represents a new generation of AI game characters designed for deeper immersion” according to Nvidia.
Analysis: reaping what was sown long ago
It should come as no surprise that Nvidia dresses this up in a lot of fancy talk. Last year, when it introduced the concept, Team Green talked about revolutionary Co-Playable Characters, or CPCs, as opposed to boring old NPCs. Of course, as my colleague at TechRadar Christian Guyton noted at the time, these are just glorified bots – and we’ve had bots for ages (PUBG has too).
Actually I was deathmatching bots about 30 years ago in Quake when the Reaper Bot mod arrived. (The Reaper was a terrifyingly accurate CPU controlled creation – positively lethal if it got hold of the lightning gun – but overall it had the strategic skills and game savvy of a house brick, and was easily overtaken by a reasonably good player, but hey, it was very early days here.)
So this isn’t a revolutionary idea, or the next step up from NPCs, or whatever accolades related to gaming greatness Nvidia might want to garner on PUBG Ally. There is more to Ella than this though, in fairness to Team Green. One half of Ella is the bot intelligence to actually play the shooter well enough (hopefully), but the other side is the AI models – the Nvidia ACE accessory.
These are small language models (SLMs that require an Nvidia GPU with at least 8GB of video RAM) that drive the AI companion’s “realistic” decision-making processes and facilitate communication via speech models. Ella is “equipped with the ability to understand and respond to game situations in a human-like manner” beyond your typical game bot, but I’m not convinced from the demo.
Ella feels painfully artificial – not human – and borderline sycophantic in the gameplay footage shared by Nvidia. OK, so this is still an early test, but I’m not getting any real ‘revolutionary’ vibes about the gameplay or chat displayed here.
Maybe we’ll get selectable personalities in time – and even realistic game types. For realism, surely there has to be the occasional AI teammate who throws a massive hissing fit about how rubbish you are before abruptly stopping, right?
The general reaction to the arrival of PUBG Ally has been as you might expect: some players are curious, while others are mystified or even horrified, and there are several in the latter camp. Some are convinced this will be very funny: “I’m looking forward to the comedy this feature will produce.” While others in the same Reddit thread are already talking about the AI’s ability to play.
I’m not surprised by the feedback so far given the way Ella has been realized by Nvidia, and the overly chatty AI hasn’t gone down well either. Players involved in a competitive game don’t want flower chat to throw them out of their flow and maybe hide important sound effects that are clues to where the enemy might be and so on.
It all leaves me pretty cold at this stage, to be honest, but among more casual players – or those who don’t have friends to play with at the time, and don’t want to hang around lobbies or be exposed to toxicity in pick-ups – Nvidia’s AI teammate could still find a place.
As long as the player in question owns a decently powerful Nvidia graphics card, another concern of mine is how much of the GPU’s resources do these AI models require? Probably not much – they’re ‘small’ by nature – but gamers are notoriously unhappy with anything that interferes with their FPS, no matter how small.
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