At the recent Unreal Fest 2026, NVIDIA officially announced that its NVIDIA ACE Game Agent SDK has entered the Beta testing stage. This toolkit allows game developers to build AI game characters that run locally for devices equipped with GeForce RTX graphics cards without relying on cloud servers.
According to NVIDIA's official introduction, ACE Game Agent SDK is designed as a "lightweight, C/C++ agent framework" that can achieve seamless native integration with games.
It is worth noting that this AI solution does not have strict hardware requirements. As shown by Ally, the AI teammate who has been put into testing in "PUBG", ACE Game Agent only needs a GPU with 8GB of video memory to run, including mid-range graphics cards such as GeForce RTX 3060. Players do not need a flagship card like RTX 5080 to experience AI teammates at all.
With the Unreal Engine 5 plug-in, all these tools and functions can be stored inside the game and run on local RTX hardware without any cloud server assistance, thus avoiding the high latency and unpredictable operating costs of cloud solutions.
The technology has been proven in real games. KRAFTON recently launched Ally, an AI teammate for limited-time beta testing in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. This AI can understand voice and text commands, independently conduct search, combat and route planning, and adjust its behavior in real time according to battlefield conditions. Another case under development is the AI consultant added by Creative Assembly in "Total War: Pharaoh". It queries more than 1,200 game data tables through the RAG architecture to provide players with real-time strategic suggestions.
NVIDIA also announced more follow-up plans, including working with Epic to introduce NVIDIA ACE into Unreal Engine's MetaHuman NPC technology, using models for speech synthesis, and combining it with Audio2Face technology to achieve facial animation that takes into account the character's emotions and personality traits. This means that future game NPCs will not only "talk" but also "have expressions."