NVIDIA launches ACE Game Agent SDK beta for local AI game characters
NVIDIA has announced the ACE Game Agent SDK beta at Unreal Fest, giving developers a new framework for building local AI characters in games. The SDK arrives alongside a new suite of NVIDIA ACE plugins for Unreal Engine 5.
The SDK is a lightweight C/C++ agentic framework designed for native in-game integration. NVIDIA says it is open source, fully customizable and optimized for small models running on RTX hardware.
Developers interact with the SDK through three main API groups. The Agent API manages stateful chat history and multi-step tool-assisted reasoning. The Chat API gives developers direct control over inference. The RAG API adds retrieval from developer-built databases, including semantic, lexical and hybrid search.
Source: NVIDIA
NVIDIA’s today annoucemnets
- The NVIDIA ACE Game Agent SDK is a lightweight, C/C++ agentic framework designed for seamless, native in-game integration. It is an open source, fully customizable solution optimized for small models and hardware-accelerated on NVIDIA RTX. Developers interact with the SDK through three core API categories – Agent API, Chat API, and RAG API. Together, these tools empower NPCs to dynamically perceive, reason, and act within the game world based on real-time player input. The tools have been used and battle-tested in real games, such as with the experimental in-game AI advisor in Total War: PHARAOH .
- A new suite of NVIDIA ACE plugins is now available for Unreal Engine 5 developers and technical artists. These plugins enable creators to implement live transcription, dynamic character dialogue, voice commands, and contextual action responses directly within their game logic. Unlike cloud-based services that suffer from high latency and unpredictable operational costs, these plugins offer local, RTX-optimized workflows bundled with ready-to-use models. These local, runtime AI models support both Blueprint and C++ integration out of the box, covering three pillars:
- Automatic speech recognition (ASR): Includes a ready-to-use English language model, nemo-conformer-ctc-120m, with download options for seven additional languages, a sample level, and Blueprint examples for rapid setup.
- Small language models (SLM): Provides local .gguf support, for low-latency text generation and function calling capabilities, optimized for immediate character dialogue and decision-making, also including a ready-to-use Qwen 3.5 4B model.
- Text-to-speech (TTS): Includes high-quality Chatterbox Turbo 350M TTS model, example voices, a sample level, and dedicated plugin content to bring characters to life instantly.
- You can download the NVIDIA ACE Unreal Engine 5 plugins here.
Total War Pharaoh gets AI-assited advisor
NVIDIA says the tools have already been tested in games. One example is the experimental AI advisor in Total War: PHARAOH, which uses retrieval-augmented generation to query more than 1,200 linked game data tables and answer strategy questions in real time.
The Unreal Engine 5 plugins cover three local AI features: automatic speech recognition, small language models and text-to-speech. The ASR plugin includes the English “nemo-conformer-ctc-120m” model, with seven more languages available for download. The SLM plugin supports local “.gguf” models and includes “Qwen 3.5 4B”. The TTS plugin includes “Chatterbox Turbo 350M” and example voices.
NVIDIA says the plugins support Blueprint and C++ integration. They are designed to add live transcription, dynamic character dialogue, voice commands and contextual action responses directly inside Unreal Engine 5 projects, without relying on cloud-based AI services.
Source: NVIDIA
