So says the company with fingers in both pies.
Doubling Dipping
Nvidia CEO and co-founder Jensen Huang is making a prediction that his company is in a unique position to both realize and profit from. Soon, he says, virtually every aspect of video games could be “infused” with AI, PC Gamer reports.
As Huang is surely eager to point out, AI has quickly carved out a significant — if ancillary — role in gaming. Features like DLSS, which only runs on modern Nvidia cards, use AI to boost frame rates and generate higher resolution images, for which it’s become a staple of PC gaming in the mere five years since it’s come out.
“We already use the idea of neural graphics,” Huang said at the Computex tech expo in Taipei — at which he was received like a rockstar, clad in his signature leather jacket and signing a woman’s chest — referring to DLSS and other features.
“The future will even generate textures and generate objects and so that the objects will be lower resolution,” he added. “So we’re gonna get richer and richer games in the future.”
Fake Friends
The gains won’t just be graphical, however. The dialog of NPCs in open world games, for example, could be AI-generated. Perhaps in competitive games, your opponent – or comrade — could be an AI that plays like a natural esports pro, slotting in seamlessly with other human players.
“It’s like having you go into a battle with six colleagues,” Huang described, per PC Gamer. “And you know all those six colleagues, maybe two of them are real people. The other four are AIs, and they can play with you for a long time. So they actually remember you.”
This is precisely the kind of narrative a company like Nvidia wants to be dangling. It has long dominated gaming hardware with its graphics cards, and in the past two years has seen itself become a $3 trillion company for its indispensable AI chips, which virtually every major player of the generative AI boom depends on.
Deepening the relationship between AI and gaming would only serve to bolster Nvidia’s dominance. And so Huang, undoubtedly aware of this, has been more vocal about the two fields supercharging each other as of late.
Still, the adoption of AI, especially generative AI, remains a thorny subject in creative industries, including gaming. For now, experiments led by major studios like Ubisoft, which show NPCs capable of holding down conversations like a chatbot, are paving the way to perhaps streamlining the industry’s infamously arduous production schedules.
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