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Producer: Electric Planet News
Author: Fat Fei classmate
Tesla broke the circle again?
A few days ago, netizens asked Musk on Twitter, "When will the Model S/X that supports playing cyberpunk come out?" Musk revealed an important plan in his reply, Tesla hopes to move the entire Steam library to Tesla, rather than traditionally porting the game one by one.
In addition, Musk has promised that Cybertruck will support running cyberpunk 100%.
Soon, a stone stirred up a thousand layers of waves. Some people in the comments section are looking forward to Tesla, who can play the AAA masterpiece, some people think that cars play games are very chicken, and some people are very curious about the technical details...
Today we will give you a history of Tesla's "game on the car" to see why Musk is so "on the top" about playing games. Where did Tesla get the courage to carry Steam to the car?
From pixels to 2D to 3A, Musk's game obsession
In the area of killing time, Musk has always been obsessed with playing games. To this end, Musk has built a game platform called "Tesla Arcade" into the car machine system.
As early as 2018, a batch of classic Atari pixel games were put on the car by Musk. With the update of the V9 system that year, classic pixel games such as Missile Command, Asteroid and Moon Lander were also updated into Tesla's car machine, and passengers could play happily through the steering wheel or touch screen.
These Atari games, though crude at the moment, have swept the United States in the last century, influencing a generation of American children, including Musk, who was born in that era.
After the pixel game, Musk set his sights on the classic 2D game "TeacupHead", and officially launched the game in the V10 version. In the past few years since its launch, it has been widely acclaimed and has become a weapon for many Tesla owners to send time in the car.
Last year, Tesla released V11, and the "Wizard 3" is now in the promotional film.
Also at last year's Model S Plaid conference, Musk demonstrated a "Cyberpunk 2077" with a car machine in order to see the computing power of the AMD chip of the new car, which surprised the four seats.
In the eyes of many people, playing games in the car is a pseudo-proposition, it is both energy-consuming, inconvenient, and potentially endangering safety. But Musk believes that "when the car starts to drive itself, the entertainment in the car becomes crucial."
But never overlook the point that Musk is a businessman, he not only has the obsession of emotional games, but also the shrewdness of constantly creating revenue growth points.
It is reported that Tesla is brewing a paid plan for car games, and like the FSD logic, many large games may not be free and require users to pay for subscriptions.
Car machine play 3A, how did Tesla do it?
From pixel games to 2D games to AAA games, hash rate is an absolute chasm that was recently filled by AMD.
Last year, the new Model S began to carry AMD Ryzen V1000 series chips, and soon the Model 3/Y also completely abandoned the intel Atom A3950 and began to replace AMD chips.
According to AMD CEO Su Zifeng, the model S/X's central control car machine uses amD's embedded APU + RDNA2 discrete graphics card chip combination, which can even be comparable to the Sony PS5.
The main task of this chip is not only to deal with huge driver assistance visual data, but also to car entertainment.
According to the latest news exposed by foreign media, the core of this chip responsible for the car part is a GPU named AMD Navi 23, the specific parameters of Navi 23 have also been disclosed, it has 2GB of GDDR6 video memory, four modules add up to a total of 8GB of video memory, the maximum bandwidth of 224GB/s, while supporting DP and HDMI 1.4 video output, support PCIE 4.0 transmission, floating point computing power up to 10 Teraflops.
In order to visually compare, foreign media also made the following comparison chart:
Compared with a number of mainstream game consoles, AMD's Navi 23 GPU is slightly inferior, but it is enough to support the operation of the 3A masterpiece. However, it should be emphasized that the performance of the "graphics card" is only the most important part of determining the game experience, and the host is always a system engineering.
In addition to the hardware, the most important thing is the optimization of the software.
To that end, two years ago, Tesla built a video game, software and user interface team in Austin, and moving games to the car was a big part of the team's mission. With Musk's grand goal of moving the Steam game library to the car, Tesla has a lot more to do.
Although Tesla and most Steam games are based on the Linux system, the necessary optimizations still need to be done, as well as licensing negotiations with Steam, system access, profit sharing, etc., which are not as simple as the previous rough "porting".
What users care most about is the experience, whether the peripherals are convenient, whether the energy consumption is acceptable, etc.
As a vehicle, the car is destined to have a morphological difference from the host computer born for the game, which also determines that it cannot touch the screen with both hands very comfortably, and it is inconvenient to use the keyboard and mouse, and the blind reliance on the gamepad will greatly reduce the experience of many games.
Musk's thinking is good, but there are still many pits to solve...
In addition to Tesla, there is also a "game maniac"
Also with the idea of putting the game console on the car is Sony, in order to show its own achievements in the audio and video entertainment industry, Sony has built two Demo concept cars.
But unfortunately, when it comes to playing AAA games, Sony doesn't seem to give a refreshing way of "interaction", just simply and rudely throwing a gamepad to you...
After combing through the Tesla on Steam, I can't help but wonder, how deep are the technical barriers to bringing AAA games to the car? Underlying system support? Heap enough hardware? None of this seems to be an insurmountable chasm. (Android does make a little effort, but it works.)
Then, the game experience is difficult to become the core competitiveness of Sony Cars, compared to Tesla, Sony's biggest advantage is its own "game library"... So it comes back to the question of buying an XBOX or a PS?
In the matter of car-machine playing games, Tesla is the forerunner, of course, there are successors. For example, domestic BYD, Xiaopeng, they use the unique advantages of Android car machines, transplanted some mobile games on the car, including many wild racing such masterpieces, but the experience of each family is somewhat awkward, or because of insufficient computing power, or because of poor interaction...
The picture is from Xiaopeng Community @ Beauty Star
In short, playing games is a very experience-heavy thing, especially for those AAA masterpieces, delicate control and rich sensory feedback are important indicators to ensure the gaming experience, and before the shape of the space in the car is not further changed, it is difficult to play these games on the car machine screen to restore your experience at home.
The views of overseas netizens... And, what do you think?
Netizens tweeted that "please don't focus on the game, focus on anything outside of the game." Implicitly, he felt that Tesla was doing this in a bad way.
Soon, the main battlefield of public opinion came to the famous American forum Hongdi Network.
One of the hottest comments put it this way: "I'd rather play Cybertruck on Cyberpunkri." Obviously, he doesn't agree with playing the AAA blockbuster on Tesla.
A similar perception is: "Seriously, it's great to play at-larger or similar games while charging, but I don't want to play cyberpunk in my car every night." At the expense of other features, I'd rather have a few more lights than a cyberpunk in my car."
There is also a developmental eye to comment: "I have too many other ways to play the game..... Maybe in 20 years, all cars will be connected and driverless."
There are naturally supportive voices in the opposition: "Before I had my own Tesla, I hoped that there would be Steam on Tesla!" 」
There is also a discussion of the technical direction between the positive and negative opinions: "Is Tesla's system Linux?" , [The game is so big, how to support the hard disk? Do you need an external connection or an upgrade that comes with your vehicle?"
......
After talking about the views and personal opinions of overseas netizens, how do you think about the car machine playing the AAA masterpiece? Will you pay for it?