GDC 2025 | Bringing AI NPCs to Life On-Device With NVIDIA ACE Small Language Models in Dead Meat @NVIDIAGameDeveloper
GDC 2025 | Bringing AI NPCs to Life On-Device With NVIDIA ACE Small Language Models in Dead Meat  @NVIDIAGameDeveloper
Uploaded May 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Watch a replay of our GDC 2025 Session, presented by Meaning Machine.

Dead Meat is a murder mystery game that features freeform conversations with AI-powered NPC “suspects”. The experience lives and dies by the depth of its characters, with players delving into the psychology of the suspects to understand ‘why they did it’. Historically, these characters required the power of LLMs in the cloud, but cloud-based LLMs are challenging for runtime games due to 3rd party costs and online dependency. By working with NVIDIA, Meaning Machine were able to bring Dead Meat’s complex characters “on device”. This involved fine-tuning a Minitron SLM, and integrating NVIDIA ACE with their own Game Conscious™ AI system. The on-device version of Dead Meat delivers the same character depth achieved in the cloud, but now it’s being done locally, on a consumer-grade GPU.

This talk from GDC 2025 breaks down how this was accomplished and offers valuable insight to game developers who want to run their AI game locally – with a particular focus on deep and meaningful NPCs.

See NVIDIA's announcements at GDC 2025: nvidia.com/en-us/events/gdc
Meaning Machine: https://www.meaningmachine.games/
Learn more about NVIDIA ACE: developer.nvidia.com/ace

#DeadMeat
#NVIDIAACE
#GeForceRTX
GDC 2025 | Bringing AI NPCs to Life On-Device With NVIDIA ACE Small Language Models in Dead MeatBeyond TrianglesReal Time Path Tracing and Denoising in Quake II RTX{Teaser} How to Build a Real-time Path Tracer | GTC 23Picking & Perfecting the Right AI Models for Your GameReal-Time Path Tracing in RE ENGINE for Resident Evil Requiem and PRAGMATARealityArts Studio & Toplitz Productions Utilizes NVIDIA Audio2Face in NPC InteractionsZorah | A New Era of Rendering, Powered by GeForce RTX 50 Series and AIVisualizing High Accuracy GPU Metrics and Trace Data with Nsight Perf SDKHow to Improve Shader Performance by Resolving LDC DivergenceGDC 2025 | The Magic Behind Ray-Traced Lighting in Star Wars™ Outlaws - Full Session Replay{Teaser} Advancing Real-Time Path Tracing with Neural Radiance Cache | GTC 23
NVIDIA Game Developer |

GDC 2025 | Bringing AI NPCs to Life On-Device With NVIDIA ACE Small Language Models in Dead Meat

SHARE TO X SHARE TO REDDIT SHARE TO FACEBOOK WALLPAPER