If it wasn’t clear before, it is now: NVIDIA is heavily investing in AI hardware. While gaming and laptops remain part of the discussion, NVIDIA’s focus is undeniably on AI.
CEO Jensen Huang set the stage the evening before COMPUTEX 2024 officially began, emphasizing the superior advantages of Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) over CPUs. Huang highlighted that “NVIDIA lives at the intersection of computer graphics, simulations, and artificial intelligence,” underscoring that accelerated computing and AI, running within the Omniverse, are poised to revolutionize the computer industry. Omniverse, NVIDIA’s real-time 3D graphics collaboration platform, enables developers to work together seamlessly and create precise simulations using RTX technology for realistic rendering.
Although the main announcements were targeted at large-scale businesses, AI factories, data centers, and computational lithography, NVIDIA also had some intriguing news for everyday consumers. The company unveiled Project G-Assist, an AI assistant with speech recognition, game screen analysis, and customized recommendation capabilities powered by RTX GPUs. Utilizing AI vision models, Project G-Assist maximizes gaming performance by providing personalized help when you’re stuck on a demanding boss or confused by game lore.
“Project G-Assist will help you beat the toughest opponent,” said NVIDIA, highlighting the assistant’s ability to set up gaming systems for optimal performance, apply safe overclocks, and reduce power consumption.
NVIDIA’s AI ambitions extend beyond gaming. The company also unveiled new tools for developers, paving the way for digital humans to become part of our everyday lives. NVIDIA NIM, a suite of ACE generative AI microservices, will soon be available for RTX AI PCs to simplify creating, animating, and operating lifelike digital humans. This suite includes automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech conversion, translation, realistic facial animation, and real-time path-traced skin and hair rendering.
“Digital humans will revolutionize industries,” Huang stated. “Breakthroughs in multi-modal large language models and neural graphics are bringing us closer to a future of intent-driven computing, where interacting with computers is as natural as interacting with humans.” The company plans to showcase NIM’s features in a Covert Protocol tech demo at COMPUTEX.
NVIDIA also announced that its GPUs will soon leverage RTX acceleration in ComfyUI, a popular modular interface for the image generation tool Stable Diffusion. This update claims seven times faster performance when compared to a MacBook Pro M3 Max and up to 60% performance boost over the existing version.
Additionally, NVIDIA will update its RTX Remix suite of modding tools, allowing developers to streamline asset replacement and scene relighting. An SDK for deploying RTX Remix’s renderers into other applications and games will also be provided. Since its launch earlier this year, according to NVIDIA, 20,000 modders have used RTX Remix to remaster classic games with complete ray tracing, DLSS, and physically accurate materials.
“NVIDIA launched the era of AI PCs in 2018,” said Jason Paul, vice president of consumer AI at NVIDIA. “With Project G-Assist and NVIDIA ACE, we’re unlocking the next generation of AI-powered experiences for over 100 million RTX AI PC users.”