PUBG's new Ally Duo game mode pairs you with an AI teammate powered by NVIDIA ACE

PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS helped define the Battle Royale genre, and the game remains one of the most-played multiplayer titles on Steam and other platforms. And this week, as part of the game's latest update, the game is introducing a new Ally Duo Mode that introduces a PUBG Ally or AI companion powered by NVIDIA ACE technology.

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The PUBG Ally and Ally Duo Mode will be available in Beta through PUBG Arcade for the next two weeks, until June 30, via Steam. NVIDIA says this will allow KRAFTON to "collect invaluable real-world player feedback" and to help guide "the future of AI agents in games." Now, generative AI in PC gaming is controversial, but based on what we've seen in early hands-on demos of the AI-powered PUBG Ally, the idea of an AI-controlled in-game partner or helper is a potential game-changer in the right circumstances.

The good news is that the PUBG Ally, called Ella, is powered by optimized, lightweight models, so it will run on GeForce RTX GPUs with at least 8GB of VRAM, with the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and GeForce RTX 3060 listed as the minimum specs. As for the recommended specs, KRAFTON lists the GeForce RTX 4070, which features 12GB of VRAM.

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Interacting with Ella is handled via voice, with the NVIDIA Parakeet speech-to-text model interpreting voice commands in real time. This data is then analyzed by the 2-billion-parameter NVIDIA Mistral-Nemo-Minitron small language model to generate context-aware natural-language responses. As expected, the PUBG Ally will communicate with players verbally, handled by a KRAFTON-developed in-house text-to-speech model that supports Korean, Chinese (Simplified), and English. All in-game inference and AI execution is baked into the graphics engine pipeline to minimize latency.

For more details on the limited-time mode, which includes map information and other details, check out the PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS Patch Notes for Update 42.1. Here's a video of the PUBG Ally in action.