There has been a lot of talk in recent months about AI-powered teammates in video games of late, with everyone from NVIDIA to Ubisoft and Take-Two expressing interest in the feature. That same Ace AI tech that NVIDIA demonstrated over a year ago has now made its way into PUBG: Battlegrounds as a time-limited game mode called Ally Duo. Announced for the PUBG: Battlegrounds update 42.1, PUBG will be introducing the new Ally Duo game mode, which will pair players with an AI-powered companion in a new arcade mode in the Sanhok jungle map.

In a demo shown off previously by NVIDIA, Ella, the player's AI companion powered by NVIDIA Ace, responds to spoken instructions with natural language, guides players with in-game info and advice, and can be controlled by the player with those same spoken instructions—for instance, helping players look for resources and vehicles, delivering those vehicles, spotting and engaging enemies, and helping set up strategic attacks. Ella and the Ally Duo game mode are currently in beta and will only be available in PUBG: Battlegrounds from June 17 to July 1. The new mode strictly requires an NVIDIA RTX GPU for AI processing, with the RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 3060 8 GB cards and 16 GB of system memory being the minimum spec, while the RTX 4070 paired with 24 GB of system RAM is recommended. Players must also enable hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling if not enabled already. The NVIDIA Ace AI PUBG demo follows.