I’ve seen Nvidia’s Project G-Assist AI assistant in person and I’m impressed: here’s why

Artificial intelligence is all the rage in the tech industry today, and after taking a look at where it’s heading in gaming, I’m increasingly convinced that it will one day replace strategy guides. It may take a while, but I’m more convinced than ever that one day we’ll live in a world where you can ask a game for help and it will give it to you.

I caught the first glimpse of this potential future at Nvidia’s headquarters in Santa Clara, where I was recently invited to meet with some of the team and watch some demos of new technologies.

G-Assist Project | Your AI assistant for games and apps – YouTube

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The most intriguing demonstration was certainly Project G-Assist, the potentially game-changing AI assistant that Nvidia debuted this summer at Computex 2024. While it may have started as an April Fool’s joke, Project G-Assist now looks like a shockingly competent vision of a future where artificial intelligence – not GameFAQ or Google – provides answers to the most pressing problems.

Where we’re going, we won’t need strategy guides

If you don’t know, G-Assist is Nvidia’s shorthand for a set of tools that developers can use to create context-sensitive AI assistants for their games. These tools can help developers extract information from you while you play (via text, speech, or even webcam) and feed it to AI models trained on various game data sources so they can effectively answer questions asked during gameplay.

The technology is still in development and not widely available, but Nvidia has partnered with Studio Wildcard to create a demo of how it works in the dinosaur-filled survival game Ark: Survival Ascended.

(Image: Nvidia)

Nvidia has been using this demo to show off G-Assist all summer, and now, after trying it out for myself, I can confirm that it’s impressive.

The G-Assist vision I saw is basically a window you can bring up in the game when you want to ask the game a question. You can then type or speak your question and (assuming you have a keyboard and/or microphone connected) within seconds the AI will respond using small and large language models (SLM and LLM).

G-Assist can identify what’s on your screen and answer questions about what you’re looking at in-game, such as an enemy’s weakness or what you can get out of it.

I also saw a live demonstration of a video game character being shown an object in real life (via webcam) and then successfully identifying the object and answering questions about it. Game developers can control what information sources models have access to. For example, the demo I tried used the Ark wiki, but the developers may have restricted sources to hide certain information from players.

You can already imagine how strategy guides could start to disappear in 5-10 years if this AI assistant technology can live up to Nvidia’s expectations. While I did notice some minor delays and occasional hiccups during a live G-Assist demonstration, for the most part the technology performed as advertised.

(Photo: Tom’s Guide)

It’s more than just AI-powered gaming tips: Nvidia is working to integrate the technology into games so that characters can respond to your requests in real time. For example, I saw a game demo where an on-screen character could hear and respond to player requests to switch between vehicles, optimize vehicles for different tasks.

It can do more than just answer your questions about how to succeed at your favorite video games. Nvidia is also happy to talk about how this type of AI assistance will be available beyond a specific video game, so you can ask for help to dynamically optimize your PC’s performance for what you’re doing that day.

For example, I saw a demo of an Nvidia representative asking Project G-Assist to help optimize an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090-equipped system for performance. Right in front of me, I saw the AI assistant recommend locking the frame rate at 60 and lowering the GPU voltage to improve performance and minimize fan noise.

As someone who answers support questions about laptop performance from readers and my parents alike, this is a huge thrill for me. There will certainly be plenty of room for productivity geeks to argue over whether such AI assistance is actually best for your computer, but it’s easy to see a potential future where most people won’t care: they’ll just click tell AI to optimize your computer for games and launch your favorite time waster.

Perspectives

It’s no secret that Nvidia has been betting big on AI for years, and now that I see where it’s headed in 2025, I’m intrigued.

The G-Assist project is still in its early days, but the tech demos I’ve seen so far are compelling and, frankly, a little scary. Right now, G-Assist demos are a bit slow and clunky, but in a few years it’s easy to imagine these features being available in the best PC games on the market.

If that future comes to pass, it’s hard to imagine why you would spend a lot of time searching for answers to your game problems on Google when you can just ask G-Assist. This may spell the end of the strategy guide industry as we know it, but the benefits could be huge for people who want a more conversational relationship with their games.