Have you ever dreamed of having a real conversation with an NPC in a video game? Not just one gated within a dialogue tree of pre-determined answers, but an actual conversation, conducted through spontaneous action and reaction? Lately, a small R&D team at Ubisoft's Paris studio, in collaboration with Nvidia's Audio2Face application and Inworld's Large Language Model (LLM), have been experimenting with generative AI in an attempt to turn this dream into a reality. Their project, NEO NPC, uses GenAI to prod at the limits of how a player can interact with an NPC without breaking the authenticity of the situation they are in, or the character of the NPC itself.

Considering that word—authenticity—the project has had to be a hugely collaborative effort across artistic and scientific disciplines. Generative AI is a hot topic of conversation in the videogame industry, and Senior Vice President of Production Technology Guillemette Picard is keen to stress that the goal behind all genAI projects at Ubisoft is to bring value to the player; and that means continuing to focus on human creativity behind the scenes. "The way we worked on this project, is always with our players and our developers in mind," says Picard. "With the player in mind, we know that developers and their creativity must still drive our projects. Generative AI is only of value if it has value for them."

Valve has released the tabulated results and statistics of its April Steam Hardware and Software Survey - the key take away from last month's user generated data is that NVIDIA's trusty GeForce GTX 1650 GPU is once again the most popular graphics card. It dethrones last month's winner - the NVIDIA RTX 3060 graphics card which falls to third place where it sits below the second place GTX 1060 GPU. The RTX 3060 experienced an almost 6% decline in usership from the previous month, and the GTX 1650's userbase grew by 2% in the same period of time. It is interesting to note that the entry for the GTX 1650 encompasses both desktop and laptop variants, while the RTX 3060 gets divided into two separate entries on Valve's survey - the desktop version sits at third place and its laptop-oriented sibling trails slightly behind with a placement at position number four. NVIDIA absolutely dominates the field with lots of its budget and midrange cards (across several older generations) - AMD and Intel barely make it into the top 25 with a small sprinkling of iGPUs and one discrete model (Radeon RX 580) placed at position 24.

April's survey shows that Intel processors remain a favorite for many Steam users with a 67.14% share, and AMD follows in second place with a 32.84% share. AMD CPU popularity is on the rise (when compared to previous months) so a more even share of the market could be on the cards, if an upward trend continues. System RAM enthusiasts were upgrading to a smaller degree last month: 52.19% are on 16 GB, and 16.1 percent are on 32 GB - indicating slight declines (from March) of 4.73% and 6.61% respectively. The majority of users prefer to stick with Windows 10 64-bit - that OS has a 61.21% share, but its popularity has dropped by 12.74% within the survey period. Windows 11 64-bit is gaining ground with a 10.98% increase from March to April, and it sits at second place with a 33.39% share of the OS userbase. As always, the results indicated by the monthly Steam Hardware and Software survey are not considered to be pinpoint accurate due to the random nature of user responses, but overall and general trends can be discerned from the data on hand.