When Nvidia first announced G-Assist it was an April Fools’ prank in 2017 that joked about an AI assistant being able to help you play a game while you ran to the door for your pizza delivery. Now, seven years later, G-Assist is back as a real demo of a powerful GeForce AI assistant that Nvidia might eventually bring to life for game developers and RTX GPU owners.
Project G-Assist is only a tech demonstration right now, but it’s a brief look at how an AI assistant could guide you through PC games and even configure optimal settings for you based on chat inputs in the future.
In a demo, Nvidia shows G-Assist responding to voice queries asking “what’s the next early game weapon and where do I find the crafting materials for it?” inside ARK: Survival Ascended. The assistant can even understand what’s happening on the screen as you play, so it can tailor itself to how many skill points you have in a game and help guide you through. Microsoft showed off a similar demo for its vision of how its Copilot AI assistant could guide Minecraft players through the game last month.
Nvidia’s own AI assistant can also optimize and tune PC settings, including providing charts of PC latency and frames per second over the past 60 seconds. It can scan your system and notice you’re only playing at 60Hz when your monitor supports 240Hz. You can also ask the assistant for recommendations to increase performance in a game, hit a 60fps performance target, or even overclock your GPU.
I’m a sucker for a slick demo as much as the next person, but until G-Assist is an app I can download and play with, I’m hesitant to buy into the AI hype given how generative AI regularly makes mistakes. The fact that Microsoft and Nvidia are both demonstrating AI assistants that could eventually guide people through games makes me think that this will progress from demo to reality real soon.