NVIDIA ACE Game Agent SDK Brings On-Device AI NPCs to Unreal Engine 5

NVIDIA ships tools for local AI game characters

NVIDIA has released the ACE Game Agent SDK in beta alongside a suite of Unreal Engine 5 plugins designed to help developers build AI-powered non-player characters that run entirely on local hardware, according to details first reported by NVIDIA Developer.

The announcement, made at Unreal Fest 2026, centers on enabling game studios to create responsive AI companions without relying on cloud infrastructure. KRAFTON's upcoming PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS feature, called Ally, demonstrates the approach: an AI teammate that understands voice commands, interprets gameplay context, and responds in real time—all powered by GeForce RTX hardware with no server calls.

Why it matters

Cloud-based AI characters introduce latency that breaks immersion and create unpredictable operational costs that scale with player count. Local execution solves both problems, but requires specialized integration work. By packaging optimized models, APIs, and engine plugins together, NVIDIA is lowering the barrier for studios that want conversational NPCs without the infrastructure overhead or response delays of remote inference.

What's in the ACE Game Agent SDK

The ACE Game Agent SDK is a lightweight C/C++ framework optimized for small models running on NVIDIA RTX GPUs. It provides three core API categories: an Agent API that manages chat history and multi-step reasoning with minimal code; a Chat API for direct inference control; and a RAG API that enables semantic and hybrid knowledge retrieval from developer-built databases.

Creative Assembly used the SDK to build an experimental AI advisor for Total War: PHARAOH. The advisor, rendered as an ancient Egyptian pharaoh, uses retrieval-augmented generation to query over 1,200 interlinked game data tables and provide contextual strategic advice in real time. The playtest program launches in 2026.

Unreal Engine 5 plugins ship with ready-to-use models

The new ACE plugins for Unreal Engine 5 support both Blueprint and C++ workflows and cover three areas: automatic speech recognition with a pre-packaged English model (nemo-conformer-ctc-120m) plus seven additional language options; small language model support via local GGUF format, including a ready-to-use Qwen 3.5 4B model for low-latency dialogue; and text-to-speech with the Chatterbox Turbo 350M model and example voices.

All three plugins include sample levels and Blueprint examples. NVIDIA is hosting a live webinar on June 30 titled "Building AI-Powered NPCs in Unreal Engine 5.7" to walk through implementation details.

DLSS 4.5 plugin adds multi-frame generation

Alongside the AI character tools, NVIDIA released an updated DLSS 4.5 Unreal Engine plugin. It adds support for Dynamic Multi Frame Generation, Multi Frame Generation 6X Mode, and a second-resolution transformer for Super Resolution. The plugin is built on Streamline and allows developers to selectively adopt features like Ray Reconstruction.

Additional Unreal Fest announcements

NVIDIA also announced NVIDIA Kimodo, an open source project for promptable human motion generation, now available as an Animotive Kimodo plugin for Unreal Engine. The plugin lets animators describe motion in natural language, pin specific bones or keyframes, and generate complex human motion that can be refined inside the editor.

SOKRISPYMEDIA, the studio behind the Chalk Warfare series, is building a full-scale first-person game where players hand-draw weapons that the game integrates in seconds. The team trained the matching model on dual NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Max-Q Workstation Edition GPUs.

The ACE Game Agent SDK beta, Unreal Engine 5 plugins, and DLSS 4.5 plugin are available for download now. Details were first reported by NVIDIA Developer.