NVIDIA's AI Assistant Turns Games into a Slideshow

NVIDIA has found itself facing an unexpected disaster. Its new AI assistant, G-Assist, designed to be an essential companion for RTX graphics card owners, has been met with a wave of criticism instead of applause. Just days after its release, Reddit users and industry experts slammed the software, calling it a "lag-ridden nightmare" and a "gaming saboteur."

G-Assist was supposed to optimize in-game settings in real time, diagnose crashes, and even provide gameplay tips. Instead, gamers experienced catastrophic performance degradation. Owners of the flagship RTX 5080 Founders Edition with 16GB of VRAM reported that enabling the AI assistant tanked their FPS from a stable 100+ frames to a miserable 5–10 FPS slideshow. In severe cases, systems froze entirely, requiring a full restart.

Testing by Windows Central confirmed the issue: even in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, where the RTX 5080 typically delivers flawless performance, G-Assist drained system resources, leaving the GPU with less VRAM than needed for basic stability. What angered users most was the assistant’s "meditative" pauses when processing commands — after a voice input, G-Assist would freeze for tens of seconds, blocking the interface as if pondering the meaning of life. Meanwhile, its hardware demands proved unjustifiably high: even RTX 30/40/50 series GPUs with 12GB of VRAM and the latest NVIDIA App 572.83+ drivers couldn’t guarantee smooth operation, turning its functionality into a lottery.

The company acknowledged the issues, stating that it is "actively collecting data to improve the AI." However, skeptics point out that this is just the latest in a series of recent NVIDIA failures, from notorious RTX 5000 driver bugs to overheating Founders Edition cards. Experts suspect that G-Assist's neural network algorithms are poorly optimized for current hardware. While gamers are disabling the assistant en masse, NVIDIA is scrambling to salvage its reputation.