Nvidia has released Project G-Assist for GeForce RTX users, offering help and recommendations among other things to improve your gaming experience. Debuting as an experimental feature inside the Nvidia App, G-Assist will be able to overclock your hardware, switch game/driver settings, and plot graphs showcasing system performance/bottlenecks.
What started as an April Fool’s joke seven years ago now has now become a real product. G-Assist can control a broad range of PC settings through software API calls, including third-party apps. For example, you can ask it if your drivers are up to date, to change your RGB lighting, or to reduce your PC’s fan noise. And the best part is, you don’t have to give it detailed steps to follow. In the case of fan noise, the AI will understand that reducing fan speed should solve the problem.
Project G-Assist can also create charts showing CPU and GPU usage, it can recommend and enable/disable settings to optimise for image quality, latency, or higher frame rates, plus it can overclock or underclock your GPU depending on your needs. Nvidia will undoubtedly add more capabilities to Project G-Assist with time. However, the community is already busily developing its own additions. Plugins are now available to download which control the volume and more for apps like Spotify.
You’ll need an Nvidia GeForce RTX 30, 40, or 50 Series graphics card with 12GB of VRAM or more, to try the G-Assist for yourself. To do so, open your Nvidia App‘s Home tab, and look for G-Assist in the Discovery section. Note however that G-Assist runs locally on your GPU and thus can cause brief dips in performance when summoned. When it finishes its task, though, everything returns to normal. This seems like a fair price to pay for a locally hosted AI model, allowing for free, private, and offline operation, not to forget better responsiveness.
Under the hood, G-Assist uses a Llama-based small language model with 8 billion parameters, enough to answer your hardware questions, but not enough to be serve as a companion chatbot. You can interact with it either using text or voice commands. Currently, it can send commands to third-party software from Corsair, MSI, Logitech, and Nanoleaf, in addition to Nvidia’s. A great tool for non-tech-savvy users who just want things to work. Unfortunately, unlike the April Fool’s version, this G-Assist can’t play your game while you’re opening the door to the pizza delivery guy.
