Nvidia Tries to Improve Game NPC Performance with AI
On March 19, Nvidia released a video of Covert Protocol at its Game Developers Conference, showing how it uses AI to make in-game NPCs respond to player interactions and generate interactions in real time based on the scene. In the demonstration, the player plays a private detective and the AI-driven NPC to carry on a conversation, the relevant content of the conversation is actually generated by the NPC in real time. Nvidia said that each game conversation is unique, and different dialog results will lead to different game direction. Nvidia vice president John Spitzer said the company’s artificial intelligence technology may provide support for complex dialog and conversational speech, so that the entire digital interaction can become more realistic.
Epic Games Launcher Will Stop Supporting Older Systems
According to YooSecurity, on March 19, Epic Games announced that support for Windows 7/8 and 32-bit Windows 10 will be discontinued starting in June 2024. After June 2024, players on these platforms will still be able to use the Epic Games Launcher, but they will no longer receive any feature or security updates, and the mall functionality may not function properly over time on these systems. After June 2024, players on these platforms will still be able to use the Epic Games launcher, but will not receive any further feature updates or security updates, and over time, the mall functionality of the Epic Games launcher on these systems may not function properly.
Call of Duty: Warzone Coming to iOS
Call of Duty: Warzone, the mobile version of the famous Call of Duty series, will be released on March 21st on the App Store for iPhone and iPad, with optimized graphics for the M-chip iPad and the iPhone 15 Pro series, and a free-to-play strategy of free-to-play and in-app purchases.
Steam’s New Family Feature Goes into Beta
On March 19, Steam announced a new version of its Family feature, which integrates several old and new family-related features and replaces the previous Steam Family Sharing and Steam Family Guardian. Users can invite up to five family members, with adult members able to manage invitations and set account limits, while child members are subject to parental controls and can’t manage the family; after joining a Steam family, family members can gain access to shared games in other members’ libraries. After joining a Steam family, family members can gain access to shareable games in other members’ libraries, create their own game archives, earn achievements, and access Creative Workshops, etc. If there are multiple copies of the same game in a family’s library, multiple family members will be able to play the game at the same time; for payments, a child’s account can request that an adult in the family make a payment to his or her shopping cart; in addition, child members of a family can’t leave on their own, while adults can leave at any time, but need to be under parental control before joining the family. Additionally, child members of a family cannot leave on their own, while adult members can leave at any time, but need to be in a previous family for 1 year before they can create or join a new family. To test the new Steam Family feature, users will need to go to Settings after launching the Steam client and then select Join in the Interface menu.
Nvidia Announces AI Accelerator Card Blackwell GB200
Nvidia announced the AI accelerator card GB200 at the GTC developer conference on March 19. The accelerator card is based on Blackwell, a next-generation AI graphics processor architecture, and is manufactured using TSMC’s 4-nanometer (4NP) process that integrates two independently manufactured die with a total of 208 billion transistors, which are then bound to the chip like a zipper through NVLink 5.0, enabling overall AI performance of up to 20 petaflops. The GB200 consists of two B200 Blackwell GPUs and an Arm-based Grace CPU, delivering up to 30x better performance than the H100 for inference of large language models, at a quarter of the cost and power consumption. In the GPT-3 LLM benchmark with 175 billion parameters, the GB200 delivers 7x the performance and 4x the training speed of the H100. NVIDIA did not release specific pricing information for the GB200, but said it will officially ship later this year.
Other News
Total Uninstaller, the well-known Windows uninstaller, has released the rebuilt new version Total Uninstaller 2024 for anyone with lifetime license to upgrade at no charge.
According to sources, OpenAI may release GPT-5 in the middle of this year (i.e., in the summer), and according to partners who have seen a demo of GPT-5, the new GPT is performing well and may include new features such as automation, and OpenAI is still in the process of training the new model.