Seeing Project G-Assist in action made us want NVIDIA's AI Assistant for all our PC gaming

Project G-Assist was a surprise announcement from NVIDIA at Computex 2024. It is a new AI-powered digital assistant designed for PC gaming with a GeForce RTX graphics card - or what the company now calls an RTX AI PC. Like DLSS, it's a general LLM or AI model trained on a broad range of titles, and Project G-Assist is ready to be plugged into any existing or upcoming release.

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Project G-Assist's capabilities and features blew us away when we got to participate in a live demo of the technology integrated into the popular survival game Ark: Survival Ascended with help from its developer, Studio Wildcard. One of Project G-Assist's key features is that it can analyze and see what's happening on the screen. Plus, it has real-time access to game-specific data.

Ark is a game full of dinosaurs, so a few of the first questions we asked were simple things like, "What's that dinosaur on the left there?" "What's the best weapon to take out that enemy, and where do I find it?" As a general model, Project G-Assist, as seen in this example, has access to up-to-date lore and various Ark knowledgebases and Wikis.

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This is important because if the AI model were trained on a specific game, it would be obsolete as soon as the developer released a patch that nerfed weapons or made fundamental changes to some of the mechanics. G-Assist is fast, too, and when asked about a group of dinosaurs, the responses made it clear that it was confident about the ones in full view but not 100% confident about those obscured or turned around and not in full view.

It's like having Chat GPT or an RTX Chat window while playing the game. What sets it apart from Wikis and other knowledgebases is that responses are tailored for the player. For example, by bringing up your inventory in Ark, you can ask G-Assist what you could use to tame a particular dinosaur. From there, G-Assist will scan your inventory and tell you exactly what weapons, food, or other items you could use.

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It can tell you where exactly you can find specific resources based on your current location in the world. It can advise how best to spend Skill Points based on your class, playstyle, or overall character goals.

The other side of Project G-Assist, and the one we instantly fell in love with, was its ability to tap into all of the performance data and metrics that NVIDIA's current drivers and software can - and use that to fine-tune the experience. G-Assist gives you average FPS and power usage numbers and can generate charts on a specified timeline (the last 5 minutes, the last hour). From there, you could ask it to optimize performance to maintain a solid 60 FPS or lower your GPU's power usage while maintaining a certain level of performance.

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Even if you don't know anything about optimization or PC latency, you can simply ask G-Assist to see if there's anything it could do to make the game run faster or smoother. It's incredible stuff, and we can't wait to go hands-on with it at home.

Unfortunately, Project G-Assist is still in the testing phase. NVIDIA tells us that it's engaging with multiple developers like Studio Wildcard to provide feedback, so there's no release window. Hopefully, it will arrive in time for the next-gen GeForce RTX 50 Series.