Technologies

I Saw the AI Future of Video Games: It Starts With a Character Hopping Over a Box

At the 2025 Game Developers Conference, graphics-chip maker Nvidia showed off its latest tools that use generative AI to augment future games.

At its own GTC AI show in San Jose, California, earlier this month, graphics-chip maker Nvidia unveiled a plethora of partnerships and announcements for its generative AI products and platforms. At the same time, in San Francisco, Nvidia held behind-closed-doors showcases alongside the Game Developers Conference to show game-makers and media how its generative AI technology could augment the video games of the future.

Last year, Nvidia’s GDC 2024 showcase had hands-on demonstrations where I was able to speak with AI-powered nonplayable characters, or NPCs, in pseudo-conversations. They replied to things I typed out, with reasonably contextual responses (though not quite as natural as scripted ones). AI also radically modernized old games for a contemporary graphics look.

This year, at GDC 2025, Nvidia once again invited industry members and press into a hotel room near the Moscone Center, where the convention was held. In a large room ringed with computer rigs packed with its latest GeForce 5070, 5080 and 5090 GPUs, the company showed off more ways gamers could see generative AI remastering old games, offering new options for animators, and evolving NPC interactions.

Nvidia also demonstrated how its latest AI graphics rendering tech, DLSS 4 for its GPU line, improves image quality, light path and framerates in modern games, features that affect gamers every day, though these efforts by Nvidia are more conventional than its other experiments. While some of these advancements rely on studios to implement new tech into their games, others are available right now for gamers to try.

Making animations from text prompts

Nvidia detailed a new tool that generates character model animations based on text prompts — sort of like if you could use ChatGPT in iMovie to make your game’s characters move around in scripted action. The goal? Save developers time. Using the tool could turn programming a several-hour sequence into a several-minute task.

Body Motion, as the tool is called, can be plugged into many digital content creation platforms; Nvidia Senior Product Manager John Malaska, who ran my demo, used Autodesk Maya. To start the demonstration, Malaska set up a sample situation in which he wanted one character to hop over a box, land and move forward. On the timeline for the scene, he selected the moment for each of those three actions and wrote text prompts to have the software generate the animation. Then it was time to tinker.

To refine his animation, he used Body Motion to generate four different variations of the character hopping and chose the one he wanted. (All animations are generated from licensed motion capture data, Malaska said.) Then he specified where exactly he wanted the character to land, and then selected where he wanted them to end up. Body Motion simulated all the frames in between those carefully selected motion pivot points, and boom: animation segment achieved.

In the next section of the demo, Malaska had the same character walking through a fountain to get to a set of stairs. He could edit with text prompts and timeline markers to have the character sneak around and circumvent the courtyard fixtures.

“We’re excited about this,” Malaska said. “It’s really going to help people speed up and accelerate workflows.”

He pointed to situations where a developer may get an animation but want it to run slightly differently and send it back to the animators for edits. A far more time-consuming scenario would be if the animations had been based on actual motion capture, and if the game required such fidelity, getting mocap actors back to record could take days, weeks or months. Tweaking animations with Body Motion based on a library of motion capture data can circumvent all that.

I’d be remiss not to worry for motion capture artists and whether Body Motion could be used to circumvent their work in part or in whole. Generously, this tool could be put to good use making animatics and virtually storyboarding sequences before bringing in professional artists to motion capture finalized scenes. But like any tool, it all depends on who’s using it.

Body Motion is scheduled to be released later in 2025 under the Nvidia Enterprise License.

Another stab at remastering Half-Life 2 using RTX Remix

At last year’s GDC, I’d seen some remastering of Half-Life 2 with Nvidia’s platform for modders, RTX Remix, which is meant to breathe new life into old games. Nvidia’s latest stab at reviving Valve’s classic game was released to the public as a free demo, which gamers can download on Steam to check out for themselves. What I saw of it in Nvidia’s press room was ultimately a tech demo (and not the full game), but it still shows off what RTX Remix can do to update old games to meet modern graphics expectations.

Last year’s RTX Remix Half-Life 2 demonstration was about seeing how old, flat wall textures could be updated with depth effects to, say, make them look like grouted cobblestone, and that’s present here too. When looking at a wall, “the bricks seem to jut out because they use parallax occlusion mapping,” said Nyle Usmani, senior product manager of RTX Remix, who led the demo. But this year’s demo was more about lighting interaction — even to the point of simulating the shadow passing through the glass covering the dial of a gas meter.

Usmani walked me through all the lighting and fire effects, which modernized some of the more iconically haunting parts of Half-Life 2’s fallen Ravenholm area. But the most striking application was in an area where the iconic headcrab enemies attack, when Usmani paused and pointed out how backlight was filtering through the fleshy parts of the grotesque pseudo-zombies, which made them glow a translucent red, much like what happens when you put a finger in front of a flashlight. Coinciding with GDC, Nvidia released this effect, called subsurface scattering, in a software development kit so game developers can start using it.

RTX Remix has other tricks that Usmani pointed out, like a new neural shader for the latest version of the platform — the one in the Half-Life 2 demo. Essentially, he explained, a bunch of neural networks train live on the game data as you play, and tailor the indirect lighting to what the player sees, making areas lit more like they’d be in real life. In an example, he swapped between old and new RTX Remix versions, showing, in the new version, light properly filtering through the broken rafters of a garage. Better still, it bumped the frames per second to 100, up from 87.

“Traditionally, we would trace a ray and bounce it many times to illuminate a room,” Usmani said. “Now we trace a ray and bounce it only two to three times and then we terminate it, and the AI infers a multitude of bounces after. Over enough frames, it’s almost like it’s calculating an infinite amount of bounces, so we’re able to get more accuracy because it’s tracing less rays [and getting] more performance.”

Still, I was seeing the demo on an RTX 5070 GPU, which retails for $550, and the demo requires at least an RTX 3060 Ti, so owners of graphics cards older than that are out of luck. “That’s purely because path tracing is very expensive — I mean, it’s the future, basically the cutting edge, and it’s the most advanced path tracing,” Usmani said.

Nvidia ACE uses AI to help NPCs think

Last year’s NPC AI station demonstrated how nonplayer characters can uniquely respond to the player, but this year’s Nvidia ACE tech showed how players can suggest new thoughts for NPCs that’ll change their behavior and the lives around them.

The GPU maker demonstrated the tech as plugged into InZoi, a Sims-like game where players care for NPCs with their own behaviors. But with an upcoming update, players can toggle on Smart Zoi, which uses Nvidia ACE to insert thoughts directly into the minds of the Zois (characters) they oversee… and then watch them react accordingly. These thoughts can’t go against their own traits, explained Nvidia Geforce Tech Marketing Analyst Wynne Riawan, so they’ll send the Zoi in directions that make sense.

“So, by encouraging them, for example, ‘I want to make people’s day feel better,” it’ll encourage them to talk to more Zois around them,” Riawan said. “Try is the key word: They do still fail. They’re just like humans.”

Riawan inserted a thought into the Zoi’s head: “What if I’m just an AI in a simulation?” The poor Zoi freaked out but still ran to the public bathroom to brush her teeth, which fit her traits of, apparently, being really into dental hygiene.

Those NPC actions following up on player-inserted thoughts are powered by a small language model with half a billion parameters (large language models can go from 1 billion to over 30 billion parameters, with higher giving more opportunity for nuanced responses). The one used in-game is based on the 8 billion parameter Mistral NeMo Minitron model shrunken down to be able to be used by older and less powerful GPUs.

“We do purposely squish down the model to a smaller model so that it’s accessible to more people,” Riawan said.

The Nvidia ACE tech runs on-device using computer GPUs — Krafton, the publisher behind InZoi, recommends a minimum GPU spec of an Nvidia RTX 3060 with 8GB of virtual memory to use this feature, Riawan said. Krafton gave Nvidia a “budget” of one gigabyte of VRAM in order to ensure the graphics card has enough resources to render, well, the graphics. Hence the need to minimize the parameters.

Nvidia is still internally discussing how or whether to unlock the ability to use larger-parameter language models if players have more powerful GPUs. Players may be able to see the difference, as the NPCs “do react more dynamically as they react better to your surroundings with a bigger model,” Riawan said. “Right now, with this, the emphasis is mostly on their thoughts and feelings.”

An early access version of the Smart Zoi feature will go out to all users for free, starting March 28. Nvidia sees it and the Nvidia ACE technology as a stepping stone that could one day lead to truly dynamic NPCs.

“If you have MMORPGs with Nvidia ACE in it, NPCs will not be stagnant and just keep repeating the same dialogue — they can just be more dynamic and generate their own responses based on your reputation or something. Like, Hey, you’re a bad person, I don’t want to sell my goods to you,” Riawan said.

Technologies

Microsoft’s Nadella says AI needs an ‘emergency brake’ that humans control

Nadella joined other tech moguls and researchers in calling for stronger safeguards and, in some cases, for the pacing of frontier development.

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Technologies

Kremlin Confirms Putin Transmitted Iran’s War Resolution Plan to Trump

The Kremlin says Putin relayed Iran’s proposal for ending the war to Trump, while Trump announced a Russian diesel supply deal that drew sharp criticism from Zelenskyy.

Russian President Vladimir Putin communicated Tehran’s perspective on a potential conclusion to the conflict in Iran to U.S. President Donald Trump, according to Russian state media reports on Saturday.

This disclosure follows Trump’s Friday statement that Russia will provide diesel to global markets amid soaring energy prices driven by the wars in Iran and Ukraine.

Russia’s Interfax news agency cited Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stating that Putin conveyed the message to Trump “in agreement with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian,” per a Google translation.

Additional Russian media accounts indicate Putin spoke with Trump by phone after meeting Pezeshkian on the margins of a summit in Turkmenistan.

Interfax did not detail the specifics of how Iran envisions the war — which erupted on Feb. 28 with U.S. and Israeli airstrikes on Iranian targets — reaching an end.

The White House did not immediately respond to Verum’s emailed request to confirm the reported conversation between Putin and Trump.

Russia supply deal

Trump announced Friday that Russia will deliver more than 4 million tons of diesel to the global market under an arrangement he said he agreed with Putin during a phone call.

Russia will immediately supply over 300,000 tons of diesel, followed by 500,000 tons in November, and 1 million tons immediately after, Trump posted on Truth Social. Moscow will then provide another 3 million tons of diesel contingent on the condition of Russia’s refineries, Trump added.

The Treasury Department temporarily waived sanctions on Russian diesel through April 2027 under a general license issued Friday.

Iran has intensified attacks on oil tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz, with vessels coming under fire almost daily as Tehran attempts to choke off a rebound in crude exports.

A senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard official stated Wednesday that Iran will block all “illicit routes” through Hormuz, according to the Fars News Agency, an outlet considered close to the Guard.

The surge in tanker attacks coincides with crude oil exports from the Middle East rebounding in September to prewar levels, largely because the U.S. military escorted ships through Hormuz along Oman’s coast.

An interim agreement signed in June between the U.S. and Iran to pause hostilities to allow for negotiations quickly collapsed.

‘Gifts to Putin’

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy immediately denounced Trump’s diesel deal with Putin. Ukraine’s leader warned that easing sanctions without a commitment from Russia to de-escalate the war will only prolong it.

“Gifts to Putin will not bring peace or any benefit to the civilized world,” Zelenskyy said in a social media post. “Russia will ‘repay’ the diesel with further terror and perfidy. Allowing Russia to sell petroleum products is an investment in a war that must be ended, not prolonged.”

Diesel prices have surged worldwide as Ukraine has pounded Russian refineries, forcing Moscow to ban diesel exports to global markets. Iran and its Houthi allies have also attacked refineries in the Middle East, further constraining fuel supplies.

Trump faces mounting political pressure to lower fuel prices ahead of the November midterm elections. Republicans confront competitive races in conservative strongholds like Iowa, where farmers feel the pinch of high diesel prices.

Technologies

AI is Changing How Lawyers Work — and Putting the Billable Hour Under Pressure

AI is reshaping the legal industry by reducing the time needed for routine tasks, challenging the traditional billable hour model, and changing how lawyers learn and practice.

Artificial intelligence is now used by almost 90% of legal professionals in the U.K. and Ireland, and it’s putting one of the profession’s oldest conventions — the billable hour — under the microscope. That’s according to legal software company Clio’s U.K. & Ireland Legal Insights Report 2026.

It found that among firms using AI, almost 80% said they can handle more work without increasing resources, while over 70% said it cut costs by absorbing administrative work once done by support staff.

As a result, AI is challenging some of the assumptions on which the legal profession was built, forcing firms to reevaluate how their lawyers spend their time, how they charge for it and how new lawyers learn the ropes. You can’t charge 16 hours for something that takes 16 secondsNick Rowles-DaviesLexolent Some of the U.K.’s biggest firms are already putting this into practice.

A&O Shearman has worked with legal AI company Harvey to develop artificial intelligence agents for tasks, including reviewing loan agreements and analyzing regulatory filings, which it says can complete in minutes work that previously took several hours. Slaughter and May, meanwhile, has rolled out Harvey across all practice areas this year, including for regulatory research and document analysis.

Billable hour pressure The billable hour is central to the business model of many law firms, but when AI significantly reduces the time lawyers spend sifting through and drafting documents, the economics are no longer so straightforward. “You can’t charge 16 hours for something that takes 16 seconds,” Nick Rowles-Davies, founder and CEO of legal finance fund Lexolent, based in London and Dubai, told CNBC.

About one in five firms that have widely adopted AI report difficulty meeting billable-hour targets, according to Clio’s report. Globally, senior legal leaders expect the share of work charged by the hour to fall from 72% to 44% over the next two to three years, according to a Deloitte survey.

Routine work is the most exposed, Rowles-Davies said. “If you’ve got standard documents and you’re just putting in detail, then clearly that’s an automatic process.” But complex legal work still requires human judgment, he added, particularly when interpreting AI output and determining the right strategy for a client.

Lawyers [are] telling us that their day is getting betterJoshua LenonClio

AI and workloads

Whether AI efficiencies ultimately make lawyers’ working lives better may depend on what firms do with the time they get back. Clio’s report found that 51% of legal professionals work evenings, but only 32% want to, while 22% work weekends compared with 11% who would choose to.

Joshua Lenon, Clio’s New York-based lawyer-in-residence, believes some lawyers are already seeing the benefits. “Lawyers [are] telling us that their day is getting better,” Lenon told CNBC, as AI becomes more commonplace.

“People are really looking at these tools and saying, ‘This is making work better.’”