NVIDIA ACE AI teammates arrive in PUBG as two-week beta tests Co-Playable Characters

Nvidia's AI squadmate is finally dropping into PUBG

The technology requires an Nvidia graphics card with 8GB+ memory and could revolutionize gaming by making NPCs more lifelike and interactive. One of the frustrating things about the proliferation of "AI", in the large language model sense, is how it muddles previously serviceable terms. It's neither artificial intelligence, in the sci-fi robot sense, nor artificial intelligence in the video game sense -- i.e., deliberate programmed behavior not controlled by the player. Until now: Nvidia's newest software goodie is very much in the latter category. This is Nvidia ACE, short for Avatar Cloud Engine, which the company has been demonstrating for multiple years. The first arguably practical implementation is now available in Player Unknown's Battlegrounds, where a special "Ally Duo Mode" will let you play with an ACE-controlled squadmate on your quest to kill every other person (and now, non-person) on the map. The mode will only be available for the next two weeks, until June 30th, and only to those with an Nvidia graphics card with 8GB of memory or more. Players won't have a competitive advantage in this mode. The demonstration video (only in Chinese, with English subtitles) does its best to make you believe that you're playing co-op with a real, talking person. It's running at least three different SLM (small language model) programs simultaneously to analyze and synthesize speech, apparently in near-real time. The demo is more or less convincing, though I must say that the ACE NPC's responses seem to have the same fawning effluence as a ChatGPT reply. The demo video's on-demand tips on where to drop on the battle royale map or alerts that it's found a specific weapon are reminding me of Razer's Project Ava anime girl in a jar. It doesn't help that the only available avatar for your squadmate is "Ella," who wears a hoodie with a corgi face in the demonstration video. There's something to be unpacked here, but it's beyond my scope of coverage as a PC nerd. That said, I find it funny that this AI demo is coming in cooperation with Krafton, a company that famously asked ChatGPT for tips on how to screw developers out of millions of dollars in contracted payments. Sadly I haven't played PUBG in years, and wasn't very good when I did, so I can't evaluate ACE's effectiveness as a virtual squadmate in combat. That seems like a pretty huge potential pitfall to this test. Though Nvidia claims that it's "responsive enough for high-stakes combat while preserving the flexible, natural feel of a true teammate," I suspect that high-skill players will still find them less useful as an actual combatant than as a decoy or distraction. That's generally how I use hired NPCs in Fortnite, anyway, and it would take a dramatic performance that didn't rely on overpowered exploits to convince me to do otherwise. Even so, having an NPC that can interact with the environment dynamically, synthesize speech without pre-recorded lines, and do it all on only a portion of video memory is impressive. Computer-controlled squadmates or escort characters have long been a thorn in the side of gamers, breaking immersion and causing headaches. They get lost or stuck on the environment, or heal you with an expensive potion after barely a scratch. Improving this AI (in the gaming sense) really could open up options for developers trying to expand their in-game worlds with more lifelike NPCs. I wonder if you could have enough variety in these characters to make them feel more real -- we've all felt how the allegedly human residents of Liberty City or Night City eventually just fade into the background, more obstacle than interactive element, after a few hours of play. And imbuing hundreds of these ACE-powered NPCs at a time is probably beyond the system's capabilities at the moment. But pulling something like that off might be a huge step forward for larger games, and even as a self-styled hater of "AI" in its modern and deliberately mislabeled incarnation, I'd be curious to see it.

Forget NPCs, now we have CPCs -- Co-Playable Characters or AI teammates in PUBG courtesy of Nvidia ACE tech, but I'm not impressed so far

* PUBG's Ally Duo mode is now in testing on Steam * Nvidia's ACE tech is powering 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 option to play with an AI teammate -- powered by Nvidia -- in a new mode which is available to try in beta for the next two weeks. As VideoCardz noticed, the Ally Duo Mode is now available through PUBG Arcade, and represents Krafton and Nvidia teaming up to use Team Green's ACE technology -- as aired 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's ready for public consumption -- at least as a beta, where the mode will be playable through to the end of June on Steam. This is an opportunity to "collect invaluable real-world player feedback, to guide the future of AI agents in games," Nvidia tells us. How does Ella work exactly? 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 typed text if you prefer), with responses from the AI designed to be suitably 'human' in feeling and tone. At least that's the idea here, but watching the brief 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 a long time ago It should be no surprise that Nvidia is dressing 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 on TechRadar Christian Guyton noted at the time, these are just glorified bots - and we've had bots for ages (PUBG has, too). In fact, I was deathmatching bots some 30 years ago in Quake, when the Reaper Bot mod arrived. (The Reaper was a horrifically accurate CPU-controlled creation -- positively lethal if it got hold of the lightning gun - but overall it had the strategic skills and gaming savvy of a house brick, and was easily trounced by a reasonably good player, but hey, these were very early days here.) So, this isn't a revolutionary idea, or the next step on from NPCs, or whatever accolades relating to gaming greatness that Nvidia might want to heap on PUBG Ally. However, there is more to Ella than this, 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 trimmings. These are small language models (SLMs requiring an Nvidia GPU with at least 8GB of video RAM) driving the AI companion's "realistic" decision-making processes, and facilitating communication via speech models. Ella is "equipped with the ability to understand and respond to game situations in a human-like manner" over and above your typical game bot, but I'm not convinced from the demo. Ella feels painfully artificial -- not human -- and borderline sycophantic in the game footage shared by Nvidia. OK, so this is still early testing, but I'm not getting any real 'revolutionary' vibes about the gaming skills or chat on show here. Maybe we'll get selectable personalities eventually -- and even true-to-life gaming types. For realism there definitely needs to be an occasional AI teammate who throws a massive hissy fit about how rubbish you are before abruptly quitting, surely? The general reaction to the emergence of PUBG Ally has been as you might expect: some gamers are curious, while others are mystified or even scathing, and there are more in the latter camp. Some are convinced this will be highly amusing: "I look forward to the comedy that this feature will produce." While others on the same Reddit thread are already trash-talking the AI's ability to play. I'm not surprised at the feedback thus far given the way Ella has been realized by Nvidia, and the AI being overly chatty hasn't gone down well either. Players engaged in a competitive game don't want flowery chat putting them off their flow, and maybe obscuring important sound effects that are clues as to where the enemy might be and so forth. The whole thing leaves me rather cold at this stage, frankly, but among more casual gamers -- or those who don't have friends to play with at the time, and don't want to hang around in lobbies, or be exposed to toxicity in pick-ups -- Nvidia's AI teammate may yet find a place. As long as the gamer in question owns a decently beefy Nvidia graphics card, that is, and another concern of mine is how much of the GPU's resources are these AI models demanding? Presumably not a lot -- they are 'small' by nature -- but gamers are notoriously unhappy about anything running interference with their FPS, no matter how slight. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.

NVIDIA launches ACE Game Agent SDK Beta for in-game AI companions that run on RTX GPUs

As part of Unreal Fest 2026, NVIDIA has announced that its new NVIDIA ACE Game Agent SDK for creating and building in-game AI companions that run on GeForce RTX hardware is now available in Beta. This suite of tools includes Unreal Engine 5 plugins for the AI-powered Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Small Language Models (SLM), and Text-to-Speech (TTS) components of NVIDIA ACE. Examples of the technology in action are already available, with KRAFTON recently launching its new PUBG Ally in-game AI teammate as part of a limited-time Beta to test and gauge feedback on a new Ally Duo Mode that will pair humans with AI. Another in-development example is Creative Assembly adding an AI advisor to Total War: PHARAOH. Naturally, the NVIDIA ACE Game Agent SDK will allow any game developer to play around with in-game AI companions, with NVIDIA noting that it has been designed as a "lightweight, C/C++ agentic framework" for seamless integration thanks to the inclusion of a ready-to-use Qwen 3.5 4B model for decision-making and an ultra-lightweight Chatterbox Turbo 350M model for text-to-speech. As seen with the new PUBG Ally, ACE Game Agents can run on GPUs with only 8GB of VRAM, and cards like the GeForce RTX 3060. So yeah, you won't need a GeForce RTX 5080 to run them. The NVIDIA ACE Game Agent SDK comprises three key APIs, and, without getting too technical, they can be summarized as follows. The Agent API handles chat history and drives multi-step reasoning with minimal coding. The Chat API gives developers complete control over inference, while the RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) API focuses on game-specific knowledge, using developer-built databases and up-to-date information to retrieve and answer player questions and act. With Unreal Engine 5 plugins, all of these tools and features can be stored within the game and then run on local RTX hardware without any cloud-based assistance. There's a lot more coming too, with NVIDIA partnering with Epic to bring NVIDIA ACE to Unreal Engine's MetaHuman NPC technology to leverage models for voice synthesis and Audio2Face technology for facial animation that takes into account emotion and personality traits of characters.

NVIDIA ACE-Powered PUBG Ally AI-Teammates now Available in PUBG Duos for Two-Week Beta

NVIDIA ACE (Avatar Cloud Engine) was first shown back at Computex 2023, with the promise to bring NPCs to life through its suite of AI technologies in games like PUBG, Naraka: Bladepoint, and inZoi. Now, players will get to test for themselves how real that promise is, as the NVIDIA ACE-powered PUBG Ally AI-teammates are available for players to add to their squad in Duos games for the next two weeks as part of a beta test. The demo video below shows a team winning a match in PUBG with one human player and one AI-controller Ally player that communicates and discusses strategy with you as you play. The AI companion is a "highly adaptive, context-aware AI teammate that dynamically adjusts its playstyle based on your commands and emergent battlefield situations," NVIDIA says in a blog announcing the beta. "It makes independent decisions such as looting, fighting and navigating to support you, all without requiring continuous prompting. Capable of understanding both voice and text inputs, from casual comments to tactical instructions, PUBG Ally possesses a deep knowledge of PUBG-specific terminology, player lingo, map locations, and item attributes." The AI companions will be available for players to check out as part of a beta test for the technology until June 30, 2026, so you have two weeks starting from today to win as many matches with an AI companion carrying you to victory. AI-powered companions in video games are, of course, nothing new conceptually, but what the AI-first company KRAFTON is introducing here alongside NVIDIA is something more than just having an NPC fight alongside you in a game. It's closer to what we've seen get implemented in Dragon Quest X or another of KRAFTON's games, the aforementioned inZoi with its 'Smart Zoi' NPCs. An AI companion that can actually respond to you and to the game, rather than being limited to carrying out pre-determined actions in pre-determined scenarios. NVIDIA claims that PUBG Ally "represents a new generation of AI game characters designed for deeper immersion," though the jury is still out as to whether these characters can actually get you more immersed in the game. 'Bots' in multiplayer games are the kind of thing you see in game modes that aren't as populated, and have always served to take players out of the multiplayer action they're trying to enjoy when they realize that kill they just got wasn't actually impressive at all. People play competitive multiplayer games for the thrill of going up against other real life human players and coming out victorious. The competitive nature of all these games is about being better than the other person. It's difficult to see how investing tons of time and energy into encouraging more play without humans is something anyone in a multiplayer game might want to have. There are arguments to be made for newcomers who are still learning the ropes, of course, but once you have a handle on how to play, adding a PUBG Ally to your squad kind of runs against the whole point of competitive multiplayer games in the first place. It'll be interesting to see how players react to the tech as they try it out over the next couple of weeks. Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.