- Nvidia launched a series of updates for gaming enthusiasts, such as Project G Assist, access to PC Game Pass, and loads more.
- It also announced several new updates for the Nvidia app, which was launched in beta mode earlier this year.
- A bunch of announcements relating to its toolkits and SDKs were also made for developers and creators.
- The company is collaborating with Microsoft to help developers bring generative AI capabilities to their native Windows and web apps.
Nvidia’s keynote at Computex 2024 was a blockbuster. Compared to rivals Intel and AMD, it had a much longer list of updates to be shared.
Most of the announcements were focused on gaming-related updates, such as a new AI-powered gaming assistant, upcoming game titles that will be equipped with the latest DLSS 3.5 with Ray Reconstruction technology, and loads more.
Other than that, major toolkits and SDK-related updates were announced for developers and creators. Last but not least, the company also announced an interesting collaboration with Microsoft—more on that later.
“With our innovations in AI and accelerated computing, we’re pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and driving the next wave of technological advancement.” – Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang
Keep reading for a detailed rundown of everything Nvidia announced at Computex 2024.
Project G-Assist
Project G-Assist is an AI-powered gaming assistant that will provide gamers with real-time guidance. Using it is pretty simple, too; it’s like a chatbot you’d find on a website.
All a player has to do is enter text or voice inputs, or a picture of their game screen to give the AI more context. The tool will then analyze the information, refer to its database of game knowledge, and create a personalized response, either in the form of speech or text.
It can also take care of your system and prepare it to deliver peak performance during gaming. It will first analyze your system’s configuration and performance.
Next, based on that, it will either apply Nvidia’s optimized game settings or enable Performance Tuning to apply a safe GPU overclock—or it will turn on NVIDIA Reflex to bring down system latency so that your game is more responsive.
Also: In February 2024, Nvidia introduced generative AI chatbot ‘Chat with RTX‘ to Windows PC.
Nvidia ACE Digital Humans
ACE Digital humans are coming to RTX AI PCs and workstations with ACE PC NIM microservices. The benefit of having ACE NIMs in the equation is that it will offer high-quality inference running locally on RTX GPUs, which will help with speech, facial aspect, and natural language understanding.
Nvidia also announced the general availability of ACE generative AI microservices in the cloud so that developers in healthcare, gaming, and customer services will be able to easily create life-like and operational digital humans.
Read more: Nvidia’s project GR00T will soon make the era of humanoid robots a reality.
Upcoming Games & Their Supporting Technology
Nvidia has partnered with some of the leading game manufacturers in the industry to deliver an immersive experience in some of the upcoming titles.
For example, Star Wars Outlaws will be equipped with DLSS 3.5 with Ray Reconstruction—a technology that maximizes frame rate, reduces noise, and creates higher-quality ray-traced images.
Similarly, the game Marvel Rivals will be equipped with DLSS 3 technology to deliver an equally intense gaming experience.
Important Note: Nvidia has also partnered with Microsoft Xbox to offer GeForce gamers a free three-month access to PC Game Pass, starting June 4th.
GeForce Cards & Compatible Cases Guideline for SFF Enthusiasts
SFF PCs (Small Form Factor PCs) are not the conventional choice for most users. So, finding the right components for them becomes a major challenge for SFF enthusiasts.
To combat this, Nvidia has partnered with graphics card and case manufacturers and created a new guideline that will instantly help you know whether a certain graphics card will fit in your SFF case or not.
The Nvidia App
In February of this year, Nvidia launched the beta version of its app in an effort to centralize the Nvidia Control Panel, GeForce Experience, and RTX Experience.
At the Computex event on June 4, Nvidia launched an update to the app with a few new features, including 120 fps AV1 video capture and one-click GPU performance tuning. What’s more, the overall app design and user experience have also been improved.
The Nvidia app will help both gamers and content creators keep their PCs updated, check for the latest available installations, manage driver settings, optimize gaming performance, and much more, all from one place.
AI & Content Creation
Nvidia’s RTX AI acceleration is now coming to ComfyUI, which will improve its performance by 60% compared to the older version and boost its speed by around 7x compared to MacBook Pro M3 Max.
ComfyUI is a web-based Stable Diffusion interface that helps you create custom workflows.
In addition to that, NVIDIA RTX Video will now be available as SDK to all developers so that they can natively integrate AI for upscaling (from low to high quality), HDR conversion, and sharpening.
The Nvidia RTX toolkit is a set of tools and SDKs for developers that they can use to create, customize, and deploy AI models across RTX PCs and the cloud.
Sure, there are a lot of open-source, pre-trained AI models already available, but most of these tools are designed for general-purpose use only. However, with the RTX toolkit, you will be able to create or customize models for specific use cases.
Furthermore, by pairing the Toolkit with the NVIDIA TensorRT model optimizer, you can make the resultant AI model consume up to 3x less RAM, which in turn will ensure that it runs at least 4x faster.
NVIDIA AI Inference Manager (AIM)
The AIM SDK is also here, although there’s only early access as of now. You can use it to simplify the process of AI integration for PC application developers.
Additionally, it pre-configures the PC with the necessary AI models, dependencies, and engines and supports all major inference backends, such as DirectML, TensorRT, Llama.cpp, and so on.
Collaboration with Microsoft
Nvidia and Microsoft are collaborating to help developers bring new GenAI capabilities to their Windows and web apps.
They will do so by providing easy API access to GPU-accelerated small language models (SLMs) that enable retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) capabilities. These run on-device as part of Windows Copilot Runtime. The API will be released later this year in developer preview.
It’s well worth noting that SLMs bring countless opportunities for developers, allowing them to experiment with content generation, content summarization, and task automation.
It’s Not as Exciting as It Looks
Although the above-mentioned announcements—as well as those by other tech giants Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm—seem exciting on the surface, there’s something dark lurking underneath. Yep, it’s the “Is AI a boon or a curse?” question that has me thinking.
Nvidia’s “digital humans” have the potential to massively disrupt employment across the globe. At a time when a myriad of industries and companies therein are already handing out massive job cuts amidst the growing use of AI, do we really need more advanced technologies to replace humans?
Here’s something I came across on my X feed which I think is worth sharing: “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.” This was shared by Joanna Maciejewska.
What’s more, the amount of energy that it would take to power all these AI models (which will increase by over a thousand times when they are sold commercially) might leave our planet in ruins.
According to a report, the AI industry will demand between 85 and 134 terawatt hours each year by the year 2027. This is the same as the annual energy requirement of the Netherlands. Sustainability certainly looks like the least of concerns at these events. Worrisome.
All in all, it will certainly be interesting to see how the world adapts to these massive technological boosts and what everyday life would look like once these products become the bottom line.
