For the person talking about Microsoft, uh, yeah have fun with that. Microsoft is more interested in using AI to replace game developers so they can get even more control over the gaming market than they are for meaningful things that would be fun. Oh look at that, Cortana will order you some Mt Dew and Flamin Hot Cheetos so you can keep...doing whatever it is that Halo is these days. Extreme! Cool, now if they'll just hurry up with the robots, we'll get Cartman's mom from that South Park episode. Lit! Leet gamerz all want that! Wait, they can use AI to combine Call of Duty with Flight Simulator, so you can play as one of the passengers on the 9/11 planes! Press X to pay respect! Or maybe they'll let you see what flying on Epstein's plane was like? Or better yet, they'll let you change your voice, so all the pedophiles and white supremacists can groom kids on Xbox Live!
This talk about how they are gonna do all this stuff reminds me of the crypto evangelists that swore it was gonna save the planet, by solving climate change (cause crypto is super duper efficient!), economic inequality, and not even joking they claimed it would solve world hunger. I was going to say that the "NPUs are gonna be so useful for gaming!" crowd as not being as delusional, but I'd guess they are, mostly because its a much lower stakes argument. So its gonna fix dialogue in games, uh, ok I guess if you want a bunch of pointless dialogue added to show off their chatbot, I don't. It'll be like having a game full of...whatever the fairie from Ocarina of Time "Hey, hey, listen!!!" But then I also am not impressed by chatbots in general. I couldn't care less about how "human sounding" they are when they still can't simply do the things I actually want, like auto-cancelling my previous car insurance plan after I have to manually redo it because that's the only way to actually check prices properly and save because they deliberately designed it that way to frustrate people into just keep rolling with their current while they increase price. If you think corporations are actually gonna let you use AI to save money or do anything but simplify things into a "Don't think! Buy NOW!" for everything, you're delusional. I don't care if it can do multi-step tasks when its things I'd specifically want to be a part of. Like I keep seeing stuff like them being shown booking a flight or finding a restaurant, when its simply doing a simple Google Maps search of basic restaurant info, no comparison, no factoring in price or other. And you know that's gonna be heavily adjusted based on things like restaurants playing along with Google and the like. Likewise, I couldn't care less about it booking a vacation when its not doing anything like comparing prices and features and the like, because that's not going to be what it does, its not there to actually help you, its gonna be there to make everything impulse purchases so you just buy buy buy without thinking. And then its gonna hound you endlessly when you don't buy. I can't wait for DoorDash simulator on my Meta Quest 5, it'll be so realistic, I can even do it while actually DoorDashing, I can make virtual money while being exploited in real life!
The magical thinking that somehow, despite them slopping everything else up with AI, and them slopping up gaming already, they're not gonna slop up gaming with AI slop, is just more of a fantasyland than the Mushroom Kingdom. We're ending up with this bizarro thing where AI liars are promising the magical "plug in and learn anything and everything, instantly!" meta Matrix (aka, the movie, where they could just plug in and have this grand story and blah blah blah, you get all that while not having to actually live in that horrible world), while they're leading us to the world the Matrix takes place in. The more I think, the real AI race is if we can convince enough of these delusional people to Web 3.0 themselves into comas before they do that to us. I guess what I'm saying is, we need crypto, AI, and gaming to all unite! Please JHH you're our only hope, make the 6969Td, complete with a new I/O in the Geforce Link Oscillating Relaxer Yummy Human Oral Likeness Experience.
Using NPU to make decent NPC and bots in games sounds good, heck, I've argued that before even, but knowing how all the other AI is going, its not gonna be what people want.
None right now, but there are obviously hypotheticals. There's a scenario where NPUs make sense to free up GPU resources when games start to incorporate local AI models while *also* wanting to look pretty. Even if the GPU has enough compute to spare, memory capacity is tricky.
Now, whether on the system level it would just make sense to have more a powerful GPU with gobs more memory, or move towards gigantic APUs with shared memory, is an open question. But from the perspective of selling CPUs that "boost your frames" (or free up enough VRAM so that your frames don't tank), then sure.
Hypotheticals that will end up like all the other ones these liars keep spouting, not living up to their claims and instead just being annoying and forced on you. Although maybe Sega should consider a Seaman remaster. Cause, using the NPU is gonna harm performance, especially since they can't even seem to do much AI without hitting up servers which means that you'll be stuttering simply waiting for their AI model to hit up their servers. If you have enough model to run it locally its gonna be taking resources from the CPU and/or GPU. Outside of maybe making ElderScrolls conversations less awkward, but that's a huge part of the charm of those games, in my opinion, so its not even something I want to fix. Then again, a chatbot hallucinating could be fun, but chances are it'll be more annoying because you know its not a canned response, and it'll just be a less funny version. But then you'll just end up with a bunch of people falling in love with video game characters. Imagine the DraftKings enabled Fleshlight where if you do well in Madden you get real money and pleasured. If not, it strips the skin off it and drains your bank account. And dudes will be like "so realistic, that's exactly how women are!"