By Christian Guyton
Publication Date: 2026-01-12 13:00:00
- At CES 2026, Nvidia revealed new advancements in its ‘ACE’ in-game AI technology
- Team Green claims 2026 will be the year we properly see AI-powered guides and teammates in games
- However, it seems like we’re still a long way off from this tech being widely implemented
At CES 2026 in Las Vegas, Nvidia had a lot to talk about. The reveal of DLSS 4.5 was the headline news, with new 6X frame generation arriving to boost framerates to even more ridiculously high numbers. We also saw new display tech, upgrades for the GeForce Now cloud gaming service, and unsurprisingly, a whole host of AI stuff.
I’ll be honest – I skimmed past some of the AI-related announcements shown in Nvidia’s presentation last week. A decent chunk of it isn’t really my ballpark; LLM building and generative video models are the territory of my colleague Graham Barlow and the TechRadar AI team.
But there was one section that immediately piqued my interest – and not just because it was something already familiar to me. When Nvidia starts talking about its ACE tech I always listen up, but I don’t always like what I hear.
ACE in the hole
For the uninitiated, Nvidia ACE is a framework for creating fully AI-powered non-player characters (NPCs) in games. It’s mostly only been a theoretical thing so far – after all, Nvidia can’t force developers to use it – but its few appearances have been fairly impressive. In fact, it actually outfoxed me when I tried to mess with it in a tech demo back in…
