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PUBG: Battlegrounds will add non-player characters powered by NVIDIA ACE generative AI. These PUBG Allies are being dubbed Co-Playable Characters, and they can have real-time conversations with a player about what's happening in a match. They can also adapt their strategies and gameplay to work with the player's style. Krafton, the battle royale's publisher, demoed this technology at CES 2025. "We will continue to innovate user experiences by integrating CPC into our games and aim to establish it as a benchmark for the gaming industry," said Kangwook Lee, head of Krafton's deep learning division. Krafton will also publish upcoming life simulator inZOI, and had a CES demo of a CPC in that game as well. NVIDIA introduced its generative AI tech, the Avatar Cloud Engine, during a keynote at Computex 2023. The ACE generative AI is also present in the multiplayer title Mecha BREAK, which appeared at Gamescom last year. The Krafton games are using on-device small language models built with NVIDIA ACE. The publisher did not specify in its press release when it will start rolling out CPCs.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pubg-will-get-ai-powered-npcs-220218057.html?src=rss
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AMD's Ryzen AI Max chips came as a huge surprise at CES 2025. They're basically super-powered versions of the company's Ryzen AI hardware with up to 16 CPU cores and 50 RDNA 3.5 graphics cores, alongside a pool of as much as 128GB integrated RAM. AMD claims the Ryzen AI Max chips will deliver up to 2.6 times faster 3D rendering than Intel's Core Ultra 9 288V, as well as 1.4 times better graphics performance. Squint a bit, and you might think AMD was taking a bit of inspiration from Apple Silicon, with its powerful CPU cores, graphics and unified memory. But according to VP Joe Macri, AMD was building towards this long before Apple. "We were building APUs [chips combining CPUs and Radeon graphics] while Apple was using discrete GPUs. They were using our discrete GPUs. So I don't credit Apple with coming up with the idea." AMD also had experience stuffing gobs of memory into its Instinct data center GPUs. Still, Macri gives Apple credit for proving that you don't need discrete graphics to sell people on powerful computers. "Many people in the PC industry said, well, if you want graphics, it's gotta be discrete graphics because otherwise people will think it's bad graphics," he said. "What Apple showed was consumers don't care what's inside the box. They actually care what the what the box looks like. They care about the screen, the keyboard, the mouse. They care about what it does." With the success of Apple Silicon, Macri was finally able to get approval to spend a "mind boggling" amount of money developing the Ryzen AI Max. "I always knew, because we were building APUs, and I'd been pushing for this big APU forever, that I could build, a system that was smaller, faster, and I could give much higher performance at the same power," he said. I briefly saw the Ryzen AI Max in action while testing the latest ASUS ROG Flow Z13 at AMD's CES booth. I was able to play Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart in 1080p at well above 60fps, with tons of graphical flourishes. It was tough to tell on such a small tablet screen, but the overall performance looked on par with a base PlayStation 5 (albeit at a slightly lower resolution). AMD claims the Ryzen AI Max is also comparable to Apple's 14-core M4 Pro chip (which it also beats out in the Vray benchmark). Ryzen AI Max systems will roll out in the first and second quarter of the year, including the aforementioned ROG Flow Z13 as well as HP's ZBook Ultra G1a.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/amd-vp-explains-why-the-ryzen-ai-max-likely-wouldnt-exist-without-apple-220034111.html?src=rss
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The Detroit-based company Astrohaus has been making its distraction-free writing tools under the Freewrite name for about a decade. So far, those have all been standalone, single-purpose devices meant simply for drafting text, but Astrohaus is branching out at CES 2025. The company just announced a mechanical keyboard called the Freewrite Wordrunner, a device designed specifically with writers in mind. This comes more than three years after Astrohaus quietly revealed intentions to build a keyboard, originally known as the Maestro. But the company eventually pulled the plug on its planned 2022 launch, and I hadnt heard anything about it since then it seems that theyve just been working away at it this whole time. CEO Adam Leeb said in a press release that the company had been iterating and developing it for almost four years. Freewrite Mechanical keyboards have largely become the domain of gamers; the company wanted to build a device for people who make their living writing instead. Without spending some quality time with it, I cant say if theyve hit that mark yet, but there are some fun ideas on display here. The Wordrunner has a tenkeyless design that looks familiar at first glance, but youll quickly notice that the function row has been replaced by a custom set of keys thatll make zipping around text documents faster. That includes find and replace, undo and redo, paragraph up and down as well as back, forward and reload keys. Id be upset about losing media controls from the function row, but the Wordrunner has it covered with the bright red joystick / button. It moves in all four cardinal directions and can also be pressed in vertically to skip tracks, play media or adjust volume. Freewrite On the other side, youll find three customizable macro keys with the cutesy names zap, pow and bam. Theyre programmable for anything you might want, but Astrohaus suggested using them to launch specific writing apps, converting text to title case or inserting the date. I dont yet know what Id use them for, but having customizable keys is a table-stakes feature for most enthusiast keyboards so Im glad to see them here. Probably the most visually striking thing about the Wordrunner are the two mechanical counters youll see up top. One is a timer you can use for writing sprints or just staying focused for a bit. More intriguing is the Wordometer dead-center at the top of the keyboard. Itll track your words with its whopping eight-digit mechanical counter, and since it saves your word count as long as you want, you could try and max it out someday. Of course, you can also reset it at any time or pause it if you dont want it to advance while youre chatting with friends or sending emails. Freewrite Beyond that, the Wordrunner features an aluminum body that Im looking forward to seeing in person I love the aluminum shell of the Freewrite Smart Typewriter and Im hoping that the keyboard feels similar. The mechanical keys are backlit, but Astrohaus isnt saying who is making them yet. But it also has some sound dampening built in so you can use it without subjecting everyone around to you overly loud key clacks (this may be a plus or minus depending on how you like your keyboards). As for connectivity, the Wordrunner uses Bluetooth or USB-C, and you can pair the keyboard with three different devices and quickly switch between them with dedicated hotkeys. Finally, theres the ever-present question of availability. Astrohaus is launching the Wordrunner on Kickstarter, as it has done with most of its other hardware over the last 10 years. The campaign should start in February with early bird pricing, but we dont know what that price will be yet. Fortunately, theres a pretty low-commitment way to get the best price if youre curious. Astrohaus says you can place a $1 reservation for priority access and the best possible pricing, with plans to deliver the first batch of keyboards before the end of the year. Thats a long ways out, but a buck isnt a bad investment if youre interested. Astrohaus is showing off a protoype of the Wordrunner at CES, and I'll be updating this post after I get my hands on it and see how it feels at this stage of development.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/accessories/the-latest-freewrite-device-is-a-fancy-mechanical-keyboard-built-with-writers-in-mind-220005961.html?src=rss
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