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NVIDIA’s latest GPU card tops its announcements at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The RTX 4080 TI SUPER can deliver 836 AI TOPS of performance (Fig. 1).
The board is aimed at 1440P (2K) quad-high-definition (QHD) gaming monitors that have become less expensive, making them very desirable to gamers. This is the target audience for the board. They’re using games that utilize the real-time ray tracing support, which depends heavily on hardware acceleration provided by the GPU.
Also announced was the lower-priced RTX 4070 TI SUPER (Fig. 2). It incorporates a 256-bit memory interface and comes equipped with 16 GB of GDDR6X memory. The card can deliver full, ray-traced images at over 100 frames/s for 1440P displays.
The GPUs can also run artificial-intelligence (AI) models that have become more important in gaming applications. Additional announcements include new libraries designed to accelerate popular AI models by more than a factor of five compared to prior versions.
One is the NVIDIA Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE), introduced earlier. It’s a cloud API that supports real-time intelligent game characters, often referred to as non-player characters (NPCs), which interact with users. In the past, the dialog with NPCs typically followed a rigid script, whereas ACE allows natural language interaction with support that extends to visual and audio feedback of the NPC in real-time. Essentially, a gamer can hold a discussion where the NPC is responding based on their backstory via a large-language-model (LLM) chatbot.
Such NPC support is provided by a number of NVIDIA services. It starts with analysis of a user’s speech. The text is then processed in the cloud using a LLM to generate a response. This response is then converted to voice that can be lip-synchronized with the graphical 3D presentation of the NPC.