Posts in category: nVidia AI

News summary: New libraries in accelerated computing deliver order-of-magnitude speedups and reduce energy consumption and costs in data processing, generative AI, recommender systems, AI data curation, data processing, 6G research, AI-physics and more. They include:

• LLM applications: NeMo Curator, to create custom datasets, adds image curation and Nemotron-4 340B for high-quality synthetic data generation
• Data processing: cuVS for vector search to build indexes in minutes instead of days and a new Polars GPU Engine in open beta
• Physical AI: For physics simulation, Warp accelerates computations with a new TIle API. For wireless network simulation, Aerial adds more map formats for ray tracing and simulation. And for link-level wireless simulation, Sionna adds a new toolchain for real-time inference

Companies around the world are increasingly turning to NVIDIA accelerated computing to speed up applications they first ran on CPUs only. This has enabled them to achieve extreme speedups and benefit from incredible energy savings.

In Houston, CPFD makes computational fluid dynamics simulation software for industrial applications, like its Barracuda Virtual Reactor software that helps design next-generation recycling facilities. Plastic recycling facilities run CPFD software in cloud instances powered by NVIDIA accelerated computing. With a CUDA GPU-accelerated virtual machine, they can efficiently scale and run simulations 400x faster and 140x more energy efficiently than using a CPU-based workstation.

A popular video conferencing application captions several hundred thousand virtual meetings an hour. When using CPUs to create live captions, the app could query a transformer-powered speech recognition AI model three times a second. After migrating to GPUs in the cloud, the application’s throughput increased to 200 queries per second — a 66x speedup and 25x energy-efficiency improvement.

In homes across the globe, an e-commerce website connects hundreds of millions of shoppers a day to the products they need using an advanced recommendation system powered by a deep learning model, running on its NVIDIA accelerated cloud computing system. After switching from CPUs to GPUs in the cloud, it achieved significantly lower latency with a 33x speedup and nearly 12x energy-efficiency improvement.

With the exponential growth of data, accelerated computing in the cloud is set to enable even more innovative use cases.

NVIDIA Accelerated Computing on CUDA GPUs Is Sustainable Computing

NVIDIA estimates that if all AI, HPC and data analytics workloads that are still running on CPU servers were CUDA GPU-accelerated, data centers would save 40 terawatt-hours of energy annually. That’s the equivalent energy consumption of 5 million U.S. homes per year.

Accelerated computing uses the parallel processing capabilities of CUDA GPUs to complete jobs orders of magnitude faster than CPUs, improving productivity while dramatically reducing cost and energy consumption.

Although adding GPUs to a CPU-only server increases peak power, GPU acceleration finishes tasks quickly and then enters a low-power state. The total energy consumed with GPU-accelerated computing is significantly lower than with general-purpose CPUs, while yielding superior performance.

In the past decade, NVIDIA AI computing has achieved approximately 100,000x more energy efficiency when processing large language models. To put that into perspective, if the efficiency of cars improved as much as NVIDIA has advanced the efficiency of AI on its accelerated computing platform, they’d get 500,000 miles per gallon. That’s enough to drive to the moon, and back, on less than a gallon of gasoline.

In addition to these dramatic boosts in efficiency on AI workloads, GPU computing can achieve incredible speedups over CPUs. Customers of the NVIDIA accelerated computing platform running workloads on cloud service providers saw speedups of 10-180x across a gamut of real-world tasks, from data processing to computer vision, as the chart below shows.

As workloads continue to demand exponentially more computing power, CPUs have struggled to provide the necessary performance, creating a growing performance gap and driving “compute inflation.” The chart below illustrates a multiyear trend of how data growth has far outpaced the growth in compute performance per watt of CPUs.

The energy savings of GPU acceleration frees up what would otherwise have been wasted cost and energy.

With its massive energy-efficiency savings, accelerated computing is sustainable computing.

The Right Tools for Every Job 

GPUs cannot accelerate software written for general-purpose CPUs. Specialized algorithm software libraries are needed to accelerate specific workloads. Just like a mechanic would have an entire toolbox from a screwdriver to a wrench for different tasks, NVIDIA provides a diverse set of libraries to perform low-level functions like parsing and executing calculations on data.

Each NVIDIA CUDA library is optimized to harness hardware features specific to NVIDIA GPUs. Combined, they encompass the power of the NVIDIA platform.

New updates continue to be added on the CUDA platform roadmap, expanding across diverse use cases:

LLM Applications

NeMo Curator gives developers the flexibility to quickly create custom datasets in large language model (LLM) use cases. Recently, we announced capabilities beyond text to expand to multimodal support, including image curation.

SDG (synthetic data generation) augments existing datasets with high-quality, synthetically generated data to customize and fine-tune models and LLM applications. We announced Nemotron-4 340B, a new suite of models specifically built for SDG that enables businesses and developers to use model outputs and build custom models.

Data Processing Applications

cuVS is an open-source library for GPU-accelerated vector search and clustering that delivers incredible speed and efficiency across LLMs and semantic search. The latest cuVS allows large indexes to be built in minutes instead of hours or even days, and searches them at scale.

Polars is an open-source library that makes use of query optimizations and other techniques to process hundreds of millions of rows of data efficiently on a single machine. A new Polars GPU engine powered by NVIDIA’s cuDF library will be available in open beta. It delivers up to a 10x performance boost compared to CPU, bringing the energy savings of accelerated computing to data practitioners and their applications.

Physical AI

Warp, for high-performance GPU simulation and graphics, helps accelerate spatial computing by making it easier to write differentiable programs for physics simulation, perception, robotics and geometry processing. The next release will have support for a new Tile API that allows developers to use Tensor Cores inside GPUs for matrix and Fourier computations.

Aerial is a suite of accelerated computing platforms that includes Aerial CUDA-Accelerated RAN and Aerial Omniverse Digital Twin for designing, simulating and operating wireless networks for commercial applications and industry research. The next release will include a new expansion of Aerial with more map formats for ray tracing and simulations with higher accuracy.

Sionna is a GPU-accelerated open-source library for link-level simulations of wireless and optical communication systems. With GPUs, Sionna achieves orders-of-magnitude faster simulation, enabling interactive exploration of these systems and paving the way for next-generation physical layer research. The next release will include the entire toolchain required to design, train and evaluate neural network-based receivers, including support for real-time inference of such neural receivers using NVIDIA TensorRT.

NVIDIA provides over 400 libraries. Some, like CV-CUDA, excel at pre- and post-processing of computer vision tasks common in user-generated video, recommender systems, mapping and video conferencing. Others, like cuDF, accelerate data frames and tables central to SQL databases and pandas in data science.

Many of these libraries are versatile — for example, cuBLAS for linear algebra acceleration — and can be used across multiple workloads, while others are highly specialized to focus on a specific use case, like cuLitho for silicon computational lithography.

For researchers who don’t want to build their own pipelines with NVIDIA CUDA-X libraries, NVIDIA NIM provides a streamlined path to production deployment by packaging multiple libraries and AI models into optimized containers. The containerized microservices deliver improved throughput out of the box.

Augmenting these libraries’ performance are an expanding number of hardware-based acceleration features that deliver speedups with the highest energy efficiencies. The NVIDIA Blackwell platform, for example, includes a decompression engine that unpacks compressed data files inline up to 18x faster than CPUs. This dramatically accelerates data processing applications that need to frequently access compressed files in storage like SQL, Apache Spark and pandas, and decompress them for runtime computation.

The integration of NVIDIA’s specialized CUDA GPU-accelerated libraries into cloud computing platforms delivers remarkable speed and energy efficiency across a wide range of workloads. This combination drives significant cost savings for businesses and plays a crucial role in advancing sustainable computing, helping billions of users relying on cloud-based workloads to benefit from a more sustainable and cost-effective digital ecosystem.

Learn more about NVIDIA’s sustainable computing efforts and check out the Energy Efficiency Calculator to discover potential energy and emissions savings.

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A deep technology conference for processor and system architects from industry and academia has become a key forum for the trillion-dollar data center computing market.

At Hot Chips 2024 next week, senior NVIDIA engineers will present the latest advancements powering the NVIDIA Blackwell platform, plus research on liquid cooling for data centers and AI agents for chip design.

They’ll share how:

• NVIDIA Blackwell brings together multiple chips, systems and NVIDIA CUDA software to power the next generation of AI across use cases, industries and countries.
• NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 — a multi-node, liquid-cooled, rack-scale solution that connects 72 Blackwell GPUs and 36 Grace CPUs — raises the bar for AI system design.
• NVLink interconnect technology provides all-to-all GPU communication, enabling record high throughput and low-latency inference for generative AI.
• The NVIDIA Quasar Quantization System pushes the limits of physics to accelerate AI computing.
• NVIDIA researchers are building AI models that help build processors for AI.

An NVIDIA Blackwell talk, taking place Monday, Aug. 26, will also spotlight new architectural details and examples of generative AI models running on Blackwell silicon.

It’s preceded by three tutorials on Sunday, Aug. 25, that will cover how hybrid liquid-cooling solutions can help data centers transition to more energy-efficient infrastructure and how AI models, including large language model (LLM)-powered agents, can help engineers design the next generation of processors.

Together, these presentations showcase the ways NVIDIA engineers are innovating across every area of data center computing and design to deliver unprecedented performance, efficiency and optimization.

Be Ready for Blackwell

NVIDIA Blackwell is the ultimate full-stack computing challenge. It comprises multiple NVIDIA chips, including the Blackwell GPU, Grace CPU, BlueField data processing unit, ConnectX network interface card, NVLink Switch, Spectrum Ethernet switch and Quantum InfiniBand switch.

Ajay Tirumala and Raymond Wong, directors of architecture at NVIDIA, will provide a first look at the platform and explain how these technologies work together to deliver a new standard for AI and accelerated computing performance while advancing energy efficiency.

The multi-node NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 solution is a perfect example. LLM inference requires low-latency, high-throughput token generation. GB200 NVL72 acts as a unified system to deliver up to 30x faster inference for LLM workloads, unlocking the ability to run trillion-parameter models in real time.

Tirumala and Wong will also discuss how the NVIDIA Quasar Quantization System — which brings together algorithmic innovations, NVIDIA software libraries and tools, and Blackwell’s second-generation Transformer Engine — supports high accuracy on low-precision models, highlighting examples using LLMs and visual generative AI.

Keeping Data Centers Cool

The traditional hum of air-cooled data centers may become a relic of the past as researchers develop more efficient and sustainable solutions that use hybrid cooling, a combination of air and liquid cooling.

Liquid-cooling techniques move heat away from systems more efficiently than air, making it easier for computing systems to stay cool even while processing large workloads. The equipment for liquid cooling also takes up less space and consumes less power than air-cooling systems, allowing data centers to add more server racks — and therefore more compute power — in their facilities.

Ali Heydari, director of data center cooling and infrastructure at NVIDIA, will present several designs for hybrid-cooled data centers.

Some designs retrofit existing air-cooled data centers with liquid-cooling units, offering a quick and easy solution to add liquid-cooling capabilities to existing racks. Other designs require the installation of piping for direct-to-chip liquid cooling using cooling distribution units or by entirely submerging servers in immersion cooling tanks. Although these options demand a larger upfront investment, they lead to substantial savings in both energy consumption and operational costs.

Heydari will also share his team’s work as part of COOLERCHIPS, a U.S. Department of Energy program to develop advanced data center cooling technologies. As part of the project, the team is using the NVIDIA Omniverse platform to create physics-informed digital twins that will help them model energy consumption and cooling efficiency to optimize their data center designs.

AI Agents Chip In for Processor Design

Semiconductor design is a mammoth challenge at microscopic scale. Engineers developing cutting-edge processors work to fit as much computing power as they can onto a piece of silicon a few inches across, testing the limits of what’s physically possible.

AI models are supporting their work by improving design quality and productivity, boosting the efficiency of manual processes and automating some time-consuming tasks. The models include prediction and optimization tools to help engineers rapidly analyze and improve designs, as well as LLMs that can assist engineers with answering questions, generating code, debugging design problems and more.

Mark Ren, director of design automation research at NVIDIA, will provide an overview of these models and their uses in a tutorial. In a second session, he’ll focus on agent-based AI systems for chip design.

AI agents powered by LLMs can be directed to complete tasks autonomously, unlocking broad applications across industries. In microprocessor design, NVIDIA researchers are developing agent-based systems that can reason and take action using customized circuit design tools, interact with experienced designers, and learn from a database of human and agent experiences.

NVIDIA experts aren’t just building this technology — they’re using it. Ren will share examples of how engineers can use AI agents for timing report analysis, cell cluster optimization processes and code generation. The cell cluster optimization work recently won best paper at the first IEEE International Workshop on LLM-Aided Design.

Register for Hot Chips, taking place Aug. 25-27, at Stanford University and online.

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Straight out of Gamescom, NVIDIA introduced GeForce NOW support for Xbox automatic sign-in, as well as Black Myth: Wukong from Game Science and a demo for the PC launch of FINAL FANTASY XVI from Square Enix — all available in the cloud today.

There are more triple-A games coming to the cloud this GFN Thursday: Civilization VI, Civilization V and Civilization: Beyond Earth — some of the first games from publisher 2K — are available today for members to stream with GeForce quality.

And members can look forward to playing the highly anticipated Indiana Jones and the Great Circle from Bethesda when it joins the cloud later this year.

Plus, GeForce NOW has added a data center in Warsaw, Poland, expanding low-latency, high-performance cloud gaming to members in the region.

It’s an action-packed GFN Thursday, with 25 new titles joining the cloud this week.

Instant Play, Every Day

GeForce NOW is streamlining gaming convenience with Xbox account integration. Starting today, members can link their Xbox profile directly to the cloud service. After initial setup, members will be logged in automatically across all devices for future cloud gaming sessions, enabling them to dive straight into their favorite PC games.

The new feature builds on existing support for Epic Games and Ubisoft automatic sign-in — and complements Xbox game sync, which adds supported PC Game Pass and Microsoft Store titles to members’ cloud libraries. Gamers can enjoy a cohesive experience accessing over 140 PC Game Pass titles across devices without the need for repeated logins.

Go Bananas

Black Myth: Wukong, the highly anticipated action role-playing game (RPG) based on Chinese mythology, is now available to stream from the cloud.

Embark on the Monkey King’s epic journey in the action RPG inspired by Chinese mythology, wielding magical abilities and battling fierce monsters and gods across the breathtaking landscapes of ancient China.

GeForce NOW Ultimate members can experience the game’s stunning visuals and fluid combat — enhanced by NVIDIA RTX technologies such as full ray tracing and DLSS 3 — at up to 4K resolution and 120 frames per second, bringing the mystical world of Black Myth: Wukong to life.

Fantasy Becomes Reality

The latest mainline numbered entry in Square Enix’s renowned RPG series, FINAL FANTASY XVI will join the cloud when it launches on PC later this month. Members can try a demo of the highly anticipated game today.

Take a journey through the epic, dark-fantasy world of Valisthea, a land dominated by colossal Mothercrystals and divided among six powerful nations teetering on the brink of conflict. Follow the story of Clive Rosfield, a young knight on a quest for vengeance after a tragic betrayal. Dive into the high-octane action with real-time combat for fast-paced, dynamic battles that emphasize strategy and skill.

The demo offers a taste of the game’s stunning visuals, intricate storyline and innovative combat options. With GeForce NOW, gamers can experience the breathtaking world of Valisthea and stream it at up to 4K and 120 frames per second with an Ultimate membership.

Everybody Wants to Rule the World

Becoming history’s greatest leader has never been easier — the Sid Meier’s Civilization franchise from 2K is now available on GeForce NOW.

Since 1991, the award-winning Civilization series of turn-based strategy games has challenged players to build an empire to stand the test of time. Players assume the role of a famous historical leader, making crucial economic, political and military decisions to pursue prosperity and secure a path to victory.

Members can lead, expand and conquer from the cloud in the latest entries from the franchise, including Sid Meier’s Civilization VI, Civilization V, Civilization IV and Civilization: Beyond Earth. Manage a budding nation with support for ultrawide resolutions, and build empires on the go using low-powered devices like Chromebooks, Macs and more.

Adventure Calls, Dr. Jones

Uncover one of history’s greatest mysteries in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Members can stream the cinematic action-adventure game from the award-winning producers Bethesda Softworks, Lucasfilm and MachineGames at GeForce NOW Ultimate quality from the cloud when the title launches later this year.

In 1937, sinister forces are scouring the globe for the secret to an ancient power connected to the Great Circle, and only Indiana Jones can stop them. Become the legendary archaeologist and venture from the hallowed halls of the Vatican and the sunken temples of Sukhothai to the pyramids of Egypt and snowy Himalayan peaks.

Ultimate members can stream the game at up to 4K resolution and 120 fps, even on low-powered devices — as well as experience the adventure with support for full ray tracing, accelerated and enhanced by NVIDIA DLSS 3.5 with Ray Reconstruction.

Let’s Play Today

In the newest season of Skull and Bones, gear up to face imminent dangers on scorched seas — from the formidable Li Tian Ning and Commander Zhang, to a ferocious dragon that descends from the heavens. Join the battle in season 3 to earn exclusive new rewards through time-limited events such as Mooncake Regatta and Requiem of the Lost. Discover new quality-of-life improvements including a new third-person camera while at sea, new endgame features and an expanded Black Market.

Members can look for the following games available to stream in the cloud this week:

• Black Myth: Wukong (New release on Steam and Epic Games Store, Aug. 19)
• Final Fantasy XVI Demo (New release on Steam, Aug. 19)
• GIGANTIC: RAMPAGE EDITION (Available on Epic Games Store, free Aug. 22)
• Skull & Bones (New release on Steam, Aug. 22)
• Alan Wake’s American Nightmare (Xbox, available on Microsoft Store)
• Commandos 3 – HD Remaster (Xbox, available on Microsoft Store)
• Desperados III (Xbox, available on Microsoft Store)
• The Dungeon Of Naheulbeuk: The Amulet Of Chaos (Xbox, available on Microsoft Store)
• The Flame in the Flood (Xbox, available on Microsoft Store)
• FTL: Faster Than Light (Xbox, available on Microsoft Store)
• Genesis Noir (Xbox, available on PC Game Pass)
• House Flipper (Xbox, available on PC Game Pass)
• Medieval Dynasty (Xbox, available on PC Game Pass)
• My Time At Portia (Xbox, available on PC Game Pass)
• Night in the Wood (Xbox, available on Microsoft Store )
• Offworld Trading Company (Xbox, available on PC Game Pass)
• Orwell: Keeping an Eye On You (Xbox, available on Microsoft Store)
• Project Winter (Xbox, available on Microsoft Store)
• Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun (Xbox, available on Microsoft Store)
• Sid Meier’s Civilization VI (Steam, Epic Games Store and Xbox, available on the Microsoft store)
• Sid Meier’s Civilization V (Steam)
• Sid Meier’s Civilization IV (Steam)
• Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth (Steam)
• Spirit of the North (Xbox, available on PC Game Pass)
• Wreckfest (Xbox, available on PC Game Pass)

What are you planning to play this weekend? Let us know on X or in the comments below.

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Developers of generative AI typically face a tradeoff between model size and accuracy. But a new language model released by NVIDIA delivers the best of both, providing state-of-the-art accuracy in a compact form factor.

Mistral-NeMo-Minitron 8B — a miniaturized version of the open Mistral NeMo 12B model released by Mistral AI and NVIDIA last month — is small enough to run on an NVIDIA RTX-powered workstation while still excelling across multiple benchmarks for AI-powered chatbots, virtual assistants, content generators and educational tools. Minitron models are distilled by NVIDIA using NVIDIA NeMo, an end-to-end platform for developing custom generative AI.

“We combined two different AI optimization methods — pruning to shrink Mistral NeMo’s 12 billion parameters into 8 billion, and distillation to improve accuracy,” said Bryan Catanzaro, vice president of applied deep learning research at NVIDIA. “By doing so, Mistral-NeMo-Minitron 8B delivers comparable accuracy to the original model at lower computational cost.”

Unlike their larger counterparts, small language models can run in real time on workstations and laptops. This makes it easier for organizations with limited resources to deploy generative AI capabilities across their infrastructure while optimizing for cost, operational efficiency and energy use. Running language models locally on edge devices also delivers security benefits, since data doesn’t need to be passed to a server from an edge device.

Developers can get started with Mistral-NeMo-Minitron 8B packaged as an NVIDIA NIM microservice with a standard application programming interface (API) — or they can download the model from Hugging Face. A downloadable NVIDIA NIM, which can be deployed on any GPU-accelerated system in minutes, will be available soon.

State-of-the-Art for 8 Billion Parameters

For a model of its size, Mistral-NeMo-Minitron 8B leads on nine popular benchmarks for language models. These benchmarks cover a variety of tasks including language understanding, common sense reasoning, mathematical reasoning, summarization, coding and ability to generate truthful answers.

Packaged as an NVIDIA NIM microservice, the model is optimized for low latency, which means faster responses for users, and high throughput, which corresponds to higher computational efficiency in production.

In some cases, developers may want an even smaller version of the model to run on a smartphone or an embedded device like a robot. To do so, they can download the 8-billion-parameter model and, using NVIDIA AI Foundry, prune and distill it into a smaller, optimized neural network customized for enterprise-specific applications.

The AI Foundry platform and service offers developers a full-stack solution for creating a customized foundation model packaged as a NIM microservice. It includes popular foundation models, the NVIDIA NeMo platform and dedicated capacity on NVIDIA DGX Cloud. Developers using NVIDIA AI Foundry can also access NVIDIA AI Enterprise, a software platform that provides security, stability and support for production deployments.

Since the original Mistral-NeMo-Minitron 8B model starts with a baseline of state-of-the-art accuracy, versions downsized using AI Foundry would still offer users high accuracy with a fraction of the training data and compute infrastructure.

Harnessing the Perks of Pruning and Distillation 

To achieve high accuracy with a smaller model, the team used a process that combines pruning and distillation. Pruning downsizes a neural network by removing model weights that contribute the least to accuracy. During distillation, the team retrained this pruned model on a small dataset to significantly boost accuracy, which had decreased through the pruning process.

The end result is a smaller, more efficient model with the predictive accuracy of its larger counterpart.

This technique means that a fraction of the original dataset is required to train each additional model within a family of related models, saving up to 40x the compute cost when pruning and distilling a larger model compared to training a smaller model from scratch.

Read the NVIDIA Technical Blog and a technical report for details.

NVIDIA also announced this week Nemotron-Mini-4B-Instruct, another small language model optimized for low memory usage and faster response times on NVIDIA GeForce RTX AI PCs and laptops. The model is available as an NVIDIA NIM microservice for cloud and on-device deployment and is part of NVIDIA ACE, a suite of digital human technologies that provide speech, intelligence and animation powered by generative AI.

Experience both models as NIM microservices from a browser or an API at ai.nvidia.com.

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Editor’s note: This post is part of the AI Decoded series, which demystifies AI by making the technology more accessible, and showcases new hardware, software, tools and accelerations for RTX PC and workstation users.

At Gamescom this week, NVIDIA announced that NVIDIA ACE — a suite of technologies for bringing digital humans to life with generative AI — now includes the company’s first on-device small language model (SLM), powered locally by RTX AI.

The model, called Nemotron-4 4B Instruct, provides better role-play, retrieval-augmented generation and function-calling capabilities, so game characters can more intuitively comprehend player instructions, respond to gamers, and perform more accurate and relevant actions.

Available as an NVIDIA NIM microservice for cloud and on-device deployment by game developers, the model is optimized for low memory usage, offering faster response times and providing developers a way to take advantage of over 100 million GeForce RTX-powered PCs and laptops and NVIDIA RTX-powered workstations.

The SLM Advantage

An AI model’s accuracy and performance depends on the size and quality of the dataset used for training. Large language models are trained on vast amounts of data, but are typically general-purpose and contain excess information for most uses.

SLMs, on the other hand, focus on specific use cases. So even with less data, they’re capable of delivering more accurate responses, more quickly — critical elements for conversing naturally with digital humans.

Nemotron-4 4B was first distilled from the larger Nemotron-4 15B LLM. This process requires the smaller model, called a “student,” to mimic the outputs of the larger model, appropriately called a “teacher.” During this process, noncritical outputs of the student model are pruned or removed to reduce the parameter size of the model. Then, the SLM is quantized, which reduces the precision of the model’s weights.

With fewer parameters and less precision, Nemotron-4 4B has a lower memory footprint and faster time to first token — how quickly a response begins — than the larger Nemotron-4 LLM while still maintaining a high level of accuracy due to distillation. Its smaller memory footprint also means games and apps that integrate the NIM microservice can run locally on more of the GeForce RTX AI PCs and laptops and NVIDIA RTX AI workstations that consumers own today.

This new, optimized SLM is also purpose-built with instruction tuning, a technique for fine-tuning models on instructional prompts to better perform specific tasks. This can be seen in Mecha BREAK, a video game in which players can converse with a mechanic game character and instruct it to switch and customize mechs.

ACEs Up

ACE NIM microservices allow developers to deploy state-of-the-art generative AI models through the cloud or on RTX AI PCs and workstations to bring AI to their games and applications. With ACE NIM microservices, non-playable characters (NPCs) can dynamically interact and converse with players in the game in real time.

ACE consists of key AI models for speech-to-text, language, text-to-speech and facial animation. It’s also modular, allowing developers to choose the NIM microservice needed for each element in their particular process.

NVIDIA Riva automatic speech recognition (ASR) processes a user’s spoken language and uses AI to deliver a highly accurate transcription in real time. The technology builds fully customizable conversational AI pipelines using GPU-accelerated multilingual speech and translation microservices. Other supported ASRs include OpenAI’s Whisper, a open-source neural net that approaches human-level robustness and accuracy on English speech recognition.

Once translated to digital text, the transcription goes into an LLM — such as Google’s Gemma, Meta’s Llama 3 or now NVIDIA Nemotron-4 4B — to start generating a response to the user’s original voice input.

Next, another piece of Riva technology — text-to-speech — generates an audio response. ElevenLabs’ proprietary AI speech and voice technology is also supported and has been demoed as part of ACE, as seen in the above demo.

Finally, NVIDIA Audio2Face (A2F) generates facial expressions that can be synced to dialogue in many languages. With the microservice, digital avatars can display dynamic, realistic emotions streamed live or baked in during post-processing.

The AI network automatically animates face, eyes, mouth, tongue and head motions to match the selected emotional range and level of intensity. And A2F can automatically infer emotion directly from an audio clip.

Finally, the full character or digital human is animated in a renderer, like Unreal Engine or the NVIDIA Omniverse platform.

AI That’s NIMble

In addition to its modular support for various NVIDIA-powered and third-party AI models, ACE allows developers to run inference for each model in the cloud or locally on RTX AI PCs and workstations.

The NVIDIA AI Inference Manager software development kit allows for hybrid inference based on various needs such as experience, workload and costs. It streamlines AI model deployment and integration for PC application developers by preconfiguring the PC with the necessary AI models, engines and dependencies. Apps and games can then orchestrate inference seamlessly across a PC or workstation to the cloud.

ACE NIM microservices run locally on RTX AI PCs and workstations, as well as in the cloud. Current microservices running locally include Audio2Face, in the Covert Protocol tech demo, and the new Nemotron-4 4B Instruct and Whisper ASR in Mecha BREAK.

To Infinity and Beyond

Digital humans go far beyond NPCs in games. At last month’s SIGGRAPH conference, NVIDIA previewed “James,” an interactive digital human that can connect with people using emotions, humor and more. James is based on a customer-service workflow using ACE.

Changes in communication methods between humans and technology over the decades eventually led to the creation of digital humans. The future of the human-computer interface will have a friendly face and require no physical inputs.

Digital humans drive more engaging and natural interactions. According to Gartner, 80% of conversational offerings will embed generative AI by 2025, and 75% of customer-facing applications will have conversational AI with emotion. Digital humans will transform multiple industries and use cases beyond gaming, including customer service, healthcare, retail, telepresence and robotics.

Users can get a glimpse of this future now by interacting with James in real time at ai.nvidia.com.

Generative AI is transforming gaming, videoconferencing and interactive experiences of all kinds. Make sense of what’s new and what’s next by subscribing to the AI Decoded newsletter.

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Snowflake is using AI to help enterprises transform data into insights and applications. In this episode of NVIDIA’s AI Podcast, host Noah Kravitz and Baris Gultekin, head of AI at Snowflake, discuss how the company’s AI Data Cloud platform enables customers to access and manage data at scale. By separating the storage of data from compute, Snowflake has allowed organizations across the world to connect via cloud technology and work on a unified platform — eliminating data silos and streamlining collaborative workflows.

Time Stamps

1:45: What does Snowflake do?
3:18: Snowflake’s AI and data strategies — building a platform with natural language analysis
5:30: How to efficiently access large language models with Snowflake Cortex
11:49: Snowflake’s open-source LLM: Arctic
16:18: Gultekin’s journey in AI and data science
23:05: The AI industry in three to five years — real-world applications of Snowflake technology
27:54: Gutlekin’s advice for professionals interested in AI

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LLMs are in the spotlight, capable of tasks like generation, summarization, translation, instruction and chatting. Annamalai Chockalingam, senior product manager of developer marketing at NVIDIA, discusses how a combination of these modalities and actions can build applications to solve any problem.

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India is home to the globe’s second-largest road network, spanning nearly 4 million miles, and has over a thousand tollbooths, most of them run manually.

Traditional booths like these, wherever in the world they’re deployed, can contribute to massive traffic delays, long commute times and serious road congestion.

To help automate tollbooths across India, Calsoft, an Indian-American technology company, helped implement a broad range of NVIDIA technologies integrated with the country’s dominant payment system, known as the unified payments interface, or UPI, for a client.

Manual tollbooths demand more time and labor compared to automated ones. However, automating India’s toll systems faces an extra complication: the diverse range of license plates.

India’s non-standardized plates pose a significant challenge to the accuracy of automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) systems. Any implementation would need to address these plate variations, which include divergent color, sizing, font styles and placement upon vehicles, as well as many different languages.

The solution Calsoft helped build automatically reads passing vehicle plates and charges the associated driver’s UPI account. This approach reduces the need for manual toll collection and is a massive step toward addressing traffic in the region.

Automation in Action

As part of a pilot program, this solution has been deployed in several leading metropolitan cities. The solution provides about 95% accuracy in its ability to read plates through the use of an ANPR pipeline that detects and classifies the plates as they roll through tollbooths.

NVIDIA’s technology has been crucial in this effort, according to Vipin Shankar, senior vice president of technology at Calsoft. “Particularly challenging was night-time detection,” he said. “Another challenge was model accuracy improvement on pixel distortions due to environmental impacts like fog, heavy rains, reflections due to bright sunshine, dusty winds and more.”

The solution uses NVIDIA Metropolis to track and detect vehicles throughout the process. Metropolis is an application framework, a set of developer tools and a partner ecosystem that brings visual data and AI together to improve operational efficiency and safety across a range of industries.

Calsoft engineers used NVIDIA Triton Inference Server software to deploy and manage their AI models. The team also used the NVIDIA DeepStream software development kit to build a real-time streaming platform. This was key for processing and analyzing data streams efficiently, incorporating advanced capabilities such as real-time object detection and classification.

Calsoft uses NVIDIA hardware, including NVIDIA Jetson edge AI modules and NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs in its AI solutions. Calsoft’s tollbooth solution is also scalable, meaning it’s designed to accommodate future growth and expansion needs, and can better ensure sustained performance and adaptability as traffic conditions evolve.

Learn how NVIDIA Metropolis has helped other municipalities, like Raleigh, North Carolina, better manage traffic flow and enhance pedestrian safety. 

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At Gamescom, the world’s biggest gaming expo, NVIDIA has once again pushed the boundaries of gaming technology to ensure that gamers have incredibly immersive experiences and can enjoy enhanced performance and visual fidelity.

The company’s announcements today include its first digital human technologies on-device small language model showcased in the first game tech demo, Mecha BREAK, a milestone celebration of 600 RTX games and applications with 20 new RTX games announced, and new games on GeForce NOW.

Alongside these, NVIDIA announced a collaboration with MediaTek that brings G-SYNC display technologies to more gamers.

Gamescom, held every year in Cologne, Germany, is where innovators from across the gaming community showcase their latest creations. In 2018, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang introduced NVIDIA RTX at the event, bringing real-time ray tracing and AI to gaming and setting a new standard for graphics performance.

NVIDIA ACE: Advancing AI-Powered Game Characters

Leading NVIDIA’s announcements at Gamescom was NVIDIA ACE, a revolutionary suite of technologies for bringing digital humans to life with generative AI.

The first game to showcase ACE and digital human technologies is Amazing Seasun Games’ Mecha BREAK, a fast-based mech combat game that demonstrates the potential of AI-powered game characters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5z7oIXhVqg

The ACE suite also expanded with NVIDIA’s first digital human technologies on-device small language model (SLM), NVIDIA Nemotron-4 4B Instruct, improving conversation for game characters. This new on-device model provides better role-play, retrieval-augmented generation and function-calling capabilities, allowing game characters to more intuitively comprehend player instructions, respond to gamers and perform more accurate and relevant actions.

Perfect World Games is advancing its ACE and digital human tech demo, Legends, with new AI-powered vision capabilities, unlocking a new level of immersion and accessibility for PC games.

Celebrating 600 RTX Games and Apps With 20 New RTX Titles

NVIDIA RTX continues to revolutionize the ways people play and create with ray tracing, DLSS and AI-powered technologies. Today marks another RTX milestone: 600 RTX-enhanced games and applications are now available.

This week, NVIDIA announced 20 new RTX and DLSS titles to join this impressive roster, including high-profile games such as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Dune: Awakening and Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

Game Science’s much-anticipated Black Myth: Wukong also launches today, featuring full ray tracing and DLSS 3, delivering the ultimate RTX experience for GeForce RTX 40 Series gamers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97egUiMlLZM

Half-Life 2: An RTX Remix Project Unveils Remastered Nova Prospekt

Half-Life 2 RTX: An RTX Remix Project from Orbifold Studios is a community remaster of Valve’s classic game. Now boasting over 100 contributing artists, Orbifold Studios unveiled a remaster of one of Half-Life 2’s most iconic levels, Nova Prospekt.

Using NVIDIA RTX Remix, Orbifold Studios has remastered Nova Prospekt with full ray tracing, DLSS 3.5 with Ray Reconstruction and Reflex. The Nova Prospekt trailer also reveals remasters of Gordon’s revolver, shotgun and Overwatch Standard Issue Pulse Rifle, remasters of the Combine soldiers and Antlions, and the addition of new geometry and detail that uses the capabilities of modern PCs to increase realism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0-F8sPprmA

NVIDIA and MediaTek Bring G-SYNC Display Technologies to More Gamers 

NVIDIA and MediaTek are collaborating to make the industry’s best gaming display technologies more accessible.

The companies’ collaboration integrates the full suite of NVIDIA G-SYNC technologies to the world’s most popular scalers, allowing for the creation of feature-rich G-SYNC monitors at a more affordable price.

A highlight of this collaboration is the introduction of G-SYNC Pulsar, a new technology that offers 4x the effective motion clarity alongside a smooth and tear-free variable refresh rate (VRR) experience. G-SYNC Pulsar will debut on newly announced monitors, including the ASUS ROG Swift 360Hz PG27AQNR, Acer Predator XB273U F5 and AOC AGON PRO AG276QSG2.

GeForce NOW Raises the Bar for Cloud Gaming

Each week geforcenow.com adds top-tier PC games on GFN Thursday to stream at peak performance from GeForce RTX SuperPODs in the cloud, along with new features and updates for members.

For Gamescom, GeForce NOW is adding the highly anticipated action role-playing game Black Myth: Wukong from Game Science, as well as a demo for the upcoming PC release of FINAL FANTASY XVI from Square Enix. A new update brings Xbox automatic sign-in, making it easy for members to quickly jump into their PC games across devices by linking their account just once.

These latest GeForce NOW updates — available today — raise the bar for cloud gaming and build on recent milestones, including added support for mods, new data centers in Japan and Poland, and 2,000 games available in the cloud. Check out GeForce NOW’s Gamescom blog for more details.

Star Wars Outlaws: GeForce RTX 40 Series Bundle 

In collaboration with Ubisoft, Massive Entertainment and Lucasfilm Games, NVIDIA is launching a new Star Wars Outlaws GeForce RTX 40 Series Bundle. Gamers will experience the first-ever open-world Star Wars game, set between the events of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back and Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, enhanced with NVIDIA DLSS 3.5, ray tracing and Reflex technologies. It’ll also be available in the cloud on GeForce NOW.

For all the news and details on NVIDIA’s latest Gamescom announcements, visit GeForce News. 

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Each week, GeForce NOW elevates cloud gaming by bringing top PC games and new updates to the cloud.

Starting today, members can stream the highly anticipated action role-playing game (RPG) Black Myth: Wukong from Game Science, as well as a demo for the upcoming PC release of FINAL FANTASY XVI from Square Enix.

Experience these triple-A releases now — at peak performance, even on low-powered devices — along with Xbox automatic sign-in coming Aug. 22 on GFN Thursday. The feature will make it easy for members to dive into their favorite PC games.

These latest GeForce NOW updates — announced today at the annual Gamescom conference — build on recent milestones, including added support for mods, new data centers in Japan and Poland, and 2,000 games available in the cloud.

Get Your Game Face On

GeForce NOW recently celebrated 2,000 games in the cloud, thanks to strong collaborations with publishers that have brought their titles to the platform.

New games are added weekly from popular digital gaming stores Steam, Epic Games Store, Ubisoft Connect, Battle.net, and Xbox, including over 140 PC Game Pass titles. Powered by up to GeForce RTX GPU-class graphics, GeForce NOW is bringing even more top titles from celebrated publishers to the cloud.

Members can be among the first to play Black Myth: Wukong without waiting for downloads or worrying about system requirements.

Take on the role of Sun Wukong the Monkey King, wielding the powers of a magical staff throughout a richly woven narrative filled with mythical creatures and formidable foes. Learn to harness Wukong’s unique abilities and combat styles, reminiscent of the Soulslike game genre. As the “Destined One,” take on various challenges to uncover the truth hidden beneath the veil of a glorious historical legend.

Witness the beauty of ancient China — from snow-draped mountains to intricate cave networks — in exquisite detail elevated by NVIDIA RTX technologies, including full ray tracing and DLSS 3. The GeForce NOW Ultimate membership brings this visual splendor to life at 4K resolution and 120 frames per second, even on underpowered devices, streaming from GeForce RTX 4080 SuperPODs in the cloud.

The latest mainline numbered entry in the renowned RPG series from Square Enix, FINAL FANTASY XVI is coming soon to the cloud. Get a taste of the title’s high-octane action, breathtaking world and epic storytelling in its PC demo on GeForce NOW. Members can learn to master their Eikonic abilities while battling colossal foes and exploring the stunning realm of Valisthea.

Try the demo on GeForce NOW to jump right into an epic adventure without worrying about system specs.

GeForce NOW members can play these titles and more at high performance. Ultimate members can stream at up to 4K resolution and 120 fps with support for NVIDIA DLSS and NVIDIA Reflex technology, and experience the action even on low-powered devices. Keep an eye out on GFN Thursdays for the latest on game release dates in the cloud.

Set It and Forget It

GeForce NOW makes gaming more convenient by letting members link their gaming accounts directly to the cloud service. Starting Aug. 22, such support extends to Xbox accounts — alongside existing support for Epic Games and Ubisoft automatic sign-in — enabling seamless access across devices.

After linking their Xbox profiles just once, members will be signed in automatically across their devices for all future GeForce NOW sessions — speeding access to their favorite PC games, from Fallout 76 to Starfield to Forza Horizon 5.

This new feature joins Xbox game library sync on GeForce NOW, which allows members to sync their supported Xbox Game Pass and Microsoft Store games to their cloud streaming library. Members will enjoy a more unified gaming experience with the ability to instantly play over 140 Xbox Game Pass titles across devices.

With a steady drumbeat of quality games from top publishers and new features to continuously improve the service, GeForce NOW is a gamer’s gateway to high-performance gaming from the cloud, enabling play on any device with real-time ray tracing and high resolutions. Check back every GFN Thursday for more news on upcoming game launches, new game releases, service updates and more.

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NVIDIA’s first digital human technology small language model is being demonstrated in Mecha BREAK, a new multiplayer mech game developed by Amazing Seasun Games, to bring its characters to life and provide a more dynamic and immersive gameplay experience on GeForce RTX AI PCs.

The new on-device model, called Nemotron-4 4B Instruct, improves the conversation abilities of game characters, allowing them to more intuitively comprehend players and respond naturally.

NVIDIA has optimized ACE technology to run directly on GeForce RTX AI PCs and laptops. This greatly improves developers’ ability to deploy state-of-the-art digital human technology in next-generation games such as Mecha BREAK.

A Small Language Model Purpose-Built for Role-Playing

NVIDIA Nemotron-4 4B Instruct provides better role-play, retrieval-augmented generation and function-calling capabilities, allowing game characters to more intuitively comprehend player instructions, respond to gamers and perform more accurate and relevant actions.

The model is available as an NVIDIA NIM microservice, which provides a streamlined path for developing and deploying generative AI-powered applications. The NIM is optimized for low memory usage, offering faster response times and providing developers a way to take advantage of over 100 million GeForce RTX-powered PCs and laptops.

Nemotron-4 4B Instruct is part of NVIDIA ACE, a suite of digital human technologies that provide speech, intelligence and animation powered by generative AI. It’s available as a NIM for cloud and on-device deployment by game developers.

First Game Showcases ACE NIM Microservices

Mecha BREAK, developed by Amazing Seasun Games, a Kingsoft Corporation game subsidiary, is showcasing the NVIDIA Nemotron-4 4B Instruct NIM running on device in the first display of ACE-powered game interactions. The NVIDIA Audio2Face-3D NIM and Whisper, OpenAI’s automatic speech recognition model, provide facial animation and speech recognition running on-device. ElevenLabs powers the character’s voice through the cloud.

In this demo, shown first at Gamescom, one of the world’s biggest gaming expos, NVIDIA ACE and digital human technologies allow players to interact with a mechanic non-playable character (NPC) that can help them choose from a diverse range of mechanized robots, or mechs, to complement their playstyle or team needs, assist in appearance customization and give advice on how to best prepare their colossal war machine for battle.

“We’re excited to showcase the power and potential of ACE NIM microservices in Mecha BREAK, using Audio2Face and Nemotron-4 4B Instruct to dramatically enhance in-game immersion,” said Kris Kwok, CEO of Amazing Seasun Games.

Perfect World Games Explores Latest Digital Human Technologies

NVIDIA ACE and digital human technologies continue to expand their footprint in the gaming industry.

Global game publisher and developer Perfect World Games is advancing its NVIDIA ACE and digital human technology demo, Legends, with new AI-powered vision capabilities. Within the demo, the character Yun Ni can see gamers and identify people and objects in the real world using the computer’s camera powered by ChatGPT-4o, adding an augmented reality layer to the gameplay experience. These capabilities unlock a new level of immersion and accessibility for PC games.

Learn more about NVIDIA ACE and download the NIM to begin building game characters powered by generative AI. 

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