Once upon a time, having an NVIDIA GPU was the hallmark of a great gaming PC. The type of NVIDIA GPU present in a gaming laptop usually swayed the decision of gamers when making a purchase. Last month, Microsoft announced a new line of PCs in collaboration with its partners called the Copilot+PC.
This new line of PCs ditched both Intel and NVIDIA GPU for Qualcomm Snapdragon chip and Qualcomm Adreno GPU. Now, NVIDIA appears to be fighting back with Project G-Assist which was announced at COMPUTEX.
NVIDIA’s Project G-Assist has context awareness that will offer valuable assistance to PC gamers, much similar to what Microsoft showcased with Copilot+PC. NVIDIA’s Project G-Assist is an RTX-powered AI assistant technology that can understand what is happening in a game and give the player real-time advice on what to do.
ALSO READ: Naughty Dog Is Currently Working On “Multiple Single-Player Projects”
Project G-Assist receives text or voice input from the player and takes a snapshot of what is in the game window. The inputs are fed into AI vision models with “context awareness and app-specific understanding for the Large Language Model (LLM)” connected to a database with game knowledge like wiki.
The output can either be text or speech from the AI, guided by what is happening in the game. According to the company, G-Assist’s vision and language models are customizable. This means developers can adapt it for a specific game or app. These custom AI models can either be run on the cloud or locally on GeForce RTX AI PCs and laptops.
We believe the announcement of Project G-Assist is NVIDIA’s direct response to Copilot+PC and the company’s way of telling Microsoft and its partners that they may be making a mistake by choosing Qualcomm Adreno over GeForce RTX.
The power of NVIDIA Project G-Assist showcased with ARK: Survival Ascended
While Copilot will have a dedicated key in the new wave of Snapdragon X-Elite-powered laptops, players will activate G-Assist with a hotkey or using a voice prompt/wake phrase. The company said that gamers can ask G-Assist regular questions they would normally search on the Internet.
In a demo, the company shared on YouTube, senior product manager Guillermo Siman asked G-Assist, “What’s the best early game weapon and where do I find the crafting materials for it?” while playing ARK: Survival Ascended.
ALSO READ: Why Is My Gaming Laptop So Slow? 5 Ways To Fix It!
In response, the AI said, “The best early-game weapon is the spear. It provides knockback and is essential for survival.” In a chat transcript overlayed on the screen, the AI further describes how to craft a spear.
“To craft a spear, you need wood, flint, and fiber. You can gather wood from trees using your hands or a hatchet, flint from rocks using a pickaxe and fiber from bushes.”
While NVIDIA’s G-Assist can presumably do everything that Copilot+PC can do in terms of providing assistance to players in compatible games, the Copilot+PC experience felt more natural compared to what NVIDIA showed off.
Thanks to Microsoft’s collaboration with OpenAI which brings the power of GPT-4o to Copilot+PCs. Anyone who watched the reveal of GPT-4o would marvel at how uncannily human the interaction with AI has become.
ALSO READ: How To Stop Sweaty Hands When Gaming—9 Tricks
This near-human communication is what Copilot+PC offers in the game. On the other hand, G-Assist felt robotic and lacked human humor and charisma. Nevertheless, backed by experience and its huge financial muscle, NVIDIA has what it takes to catch up with the Copilot+PC experience—and maybe overtake it.
In addition to providing advice during gameplay, G-Assist can also help players optimize their system performance and provide performance insights that will help the players get the most out of their system’s power—including guiding players on the best setting for their game based on their system’s spec.
What is it for you, Microsoft’s Copilot+PCs or NVIDIA’s Project G-Assist PCs? Share your thoughts in the comment box below.
