6 ms·

Unlikely. Frosted glass blur was introduced almost twelve years ago in iOS 7, and was supported all the way down to the iPhone 4. Many apps like control center

Unlikely. Frosted glass blur was introduced almost twelve years ago in iOS 7, and was supported all the way down to the iPhone 4. Many apps like control center have used a full screen blur without any performance issues for a long time. Apple at the time created their own 'approximate gaussian blur' algorithm specifically to enable this, and it ran crazy fast on devices where a simple gaussian blur would barely achieve double digit FPS. Even if this 'liquid glass' effect is heavier to compute, on the hardware we have today it will be a negligible performance concern.

mholt 1y ago
This isn't just a gaussian blur though, there's raytracing and refractions happening. The OS is becoming a low-key high-fidelity video game.
- gfody 1y ago
  it looks like old school 2D bumpmapping to me, it's not expensive if you don't overengineer it
- seemack 1y ago
  From what I've seen,the refractions happen in predictable contexts so I suspect that they'll be able to create shaders, etc that will limit the performance hit
  - adastra22 1y ago
    Ray tracing is done in shaders these days. Doesn't make it cheap.
    - skhr0680 1y ago
      The comment you’re replying to probably means “a shader that is a fine approximation of ray tracing (for cheap)”
- AlienRobot 1y ago
  I don't usually say things are bloated but raytracing buttons is something I'd expect to be a parody... And all of this just to make the whole UI white and generic. I just want everything to look like Windows XP. I don't get it.
  - mananaysiempre 1y ago
    It’s almost certain to be a fairly cheap thing, at least for a GPU that can sling pixels at the gigabytes per second necessary to get smooth touch scrolling at these screen resolutions. The demos only show a very limited array of shapes. Precompute the refraction, store the result in a texture, and the gist should be sample(blur(background), sample(refraction, point)). Probably a bit more complicated than this—I’m no magician of the kind that’s needed to devise cheap graphics tricks like this—but the computational effort should be in that ballpark. Compared to on-device language models and such, I wouldn’t be worried. (Also, do I need to remind you of the absolute disdain directed by 95/98/Me/2000 users at the “toy” default theme of XP? And it was a bit silly, to be honest. It’s just that major software outfits don’t dare to be silly anymore, and that way lies blandness.)
    - lodovic 1y ago
      > It’s just that major software outfits don’t dare to be silly anymore, and that way lies blandness Great observation! We need some of that sillyness back. Everything is all serious and corporate nowadays, even 'fun' stuff like social media or games. Even movies can't be silly anymore.
      - stereolambda 1y ago
        Not sure about 'serious and corporate', the big corps like to appear cute, folksy etc. and recently we even saw new Google Material Design advertised as judged more "rebellious" by focus groups. Maybe bland and toothless is just a general direction of contemporary culture and style that they follow. Myself, I can appreciate corporate stuff presenting corporate. More truthful, feels a little less manipulative.
    - 1y ago
- _bent 1y ago
  where do you see raytracing? it's just reading back the texture of the layer behind a bit distorted. honestly that's cheaper than a blur
- bobbylarrybobby 1y ago
  I would imagine that for a known geometry of glass, you can do the ray tracing once, see where each photon ends up, and then bake that transformation into the UI. If you do this for each edge and curve your UI will produce, you can stitch them together piecewise to form UI elements of different shapes without computing everything again from scratch.
  - LtdJorge 1y ago
    The sampling will still affect performance.
loloquwowndueo 1y ago
“Supported” and “works well” ain’t the same. Do you remember how your iPhone 4 crawled when that effect was enabled?
DecentShoes 1y ago
iOS 7 made the iPhone 4 practically unusable.
miffy900 1y ago
> Unlikely. Frosted glass blur was introduced almost twelve years ago in iOS 7, and was supported all the way down to the iPhone 4. Many apps like control center have used a full screen blur without any performance issues for a long time. "Without any performance issues"? Entirely false - reviews at the time noted iOS 7 dramatically reduced battery life - all across the board for Apple devices, even for the then latest iPhone 5S and 5c (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/09/ios-7-thoroughly-reviewed/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/09/ios-7-thoroughly-rev...). The abuse of transparency/translucency in the UI was the primary reason - you could go to Accessibility settings and disable animations + transparency/translucency and get notable increases in both runtime speed of the OS UI and battery life.
- threeseed 1y ago
  You can’t judge battery life and performance off a .0 release when the priority is on delivering features with the minimum number of showstopper bugs. At least wait until the .1. It has been like this for every Apple release for over 20 years.
  - TylerE 1y ago
    Poor performance of a GUI is a showstopper bug. It should be, anyway.
  - bigyabai 1y ago
    If Apple has been shipping betas for 2 decades that do not meaningfully prepare the release candidate for users, something is horribly wrong. They're either not listening to the feedback they receive or they're not giving themselves enough time; both are firmly within Apple's control.
    - 0x457 1y ago
      Well, firstly, this is a developer beta. So the target audience are developers that want to get a head start on getting their app(s) ready. So measuring battery performance of those dev betas is dumb. Also, they do listen to feedback and do gather it. They won't change entire design language now tho.
kevingadd 1y ago
Anyone who's ever written a blur shader knows that blurs aren't cheap.
andrewmcwatters 1y ago
Yes! And it was frustratingly patented! https://patents.google.com/patent/US7397964B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7397964B2/en I made a comment about this a couple of years ago, but I fudged the explanation of it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34937618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34937618 I suspect that their new technique implements the existing fast gaussian blur, and since the patent is about to expire, it was a good time to spice it up. I suspect as others have mentioned here, they use a "Liquid Glass" shader which samples the backing layer of the UI composition below the target element and applies a lens distortion based on the target element's border radius, all heavily parameterized so as to be used with the rest of the system's Liquid Glass applications like the new icon system.
rjmunro 1y ago
Surely it's a performance nightmare because whatever is behind the frosting has to be rendered in full. Without this it can see that it's occluded and not have to render. Or does MacOS not do that?
p_l 1y ago
Early iPhone hardware was barely keeping with rendering the UI with a total ban on transparency. Even on iPhone 4 which improved the hardware a lot had the issue that it also increased amount of pixels to be pushed around. And yes, later iOS on early hardware was huge PITA and slowdown.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

mholt 1y ago

This isn't just a gaussian blur though, there's raytracing and refractions happening. The OS is becoming a low-key high-fidelity video game.

gfody 1y ago
it looks like old school 2D bumpmapping to me, it's not expensive if you don't overengineer it
seemack 1y ago
From what I've seen,the refractions happen in predictable contexts so I suspect that they'll be able to create shaders, etc that will limit the performance hit
- adastra22 1y ago
  Ray tracing is done in shaders these days. Doesn't make it cheap.
  - skhr0680 1y ago
    The comment you’re replying to probably means “a shader that is a fine approximation of ray tracing (for cheap)”
AlienRobot 1y ago
I don't usually say things are bloated but raytracing buttons is something I'd expect to be a parody... And all of this just to make the whole UI white and generic. I just want everything to look like Windows XP. I don't get it.
- mananaysiempre 1y ago
  It’s almost certain to be a fairly cheap thing, at least for a GPU that can sling pixels at the gigabytes per second necessary to get smooth touch scrolling at these screen resolutions. The demos only show a very limited array of shapes. Precompute the refraction, store the result in a texture, and the gist should be sample(blur(background), sample(refraction, point)). Probably a bit more complicated than this—I’m no magician of the kind that’s needed to devise cheap graphics tricks like this—but the computational effort should be in that ballpark. Compared to on-device language models and such, I wouldn’t be worried. (Also, do I need to remind you of the absolute disdain directed by 95/98/Me/2000 users at the “toy” default theme of XP? And it was a bit silly, to be honest. It’s just that major software outfits don’t dare to be silly anymore, and that way lies blandness.)
  - lodovic 1y ago
    > It’s just that major software outfits don’t dare to be silly anymore, and that way lies blandness Great observation! We need some of that sillyness back. Everything is all serious and corporate nowadays, even 'fun' stuff like social media or games. Even movies can't be silly anymore.
    - stereolambda 1y ago
      Not sure about 'serious and corporate', the big corps like to appear cute, folksy etc. and recently we even saw new Google Material Design advertised as judged more "rebellious" by focus groups. Maybe bland and toothless is just a general direction of contemporary culture and style that they follow. Myself, I can appreciate corporate stuff presenting corporate. More truthful, feels a little less manipulative.
  - 1y ago
_bent 1y ago
where do you see raytracing? it's just reading back the texture of the layer behind a bit distorted. honestly that's cheaper than a blur
bobbylarrybobby 1y ago
I would imagine that for a known geometry of glass, you can do the ray tracing once, see where each photon ends up, and then bake that transformation into the UI. If you do this for each edge and curve your UI will produce, you can stitch them together piecewise to form UI elements of different shapes without computing everything again from scratch.
- LtdJorge 1y ago
  The sampling will still affect performance.

loloquwowndueo 1y ago

“Supported” and “works well” ain’t the same. Do you remember how your iPhone 4 crawled when that effect was enabled?

DecentShoes 1y ago

iOS 7 made the iPhone 4 practically unusable.

miffy900 1y ago

> Unlikely. Frosted glass blur was introduced almost twelve years ago in iOS 7, and was supported all the way down to the iPhone 4. Many apps like control center have used a full screen blur without any performance issues for a long time. "Without any performance issues"? Entirely false - reviews at the time noted iOS 7 dramatically reduced battery life - all across the board for Apple devices, even for the then latest iPhone 5S and 5c (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/09/ios-7-thoroughly-reviewed/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/09/ios-7-thoroughly-rev...). The abuse of transparency/translucency in the UI was the primary reason - you could go to Accessibility settings and disable animations + transparency/translucency and get notable increases in both runtime speed of the OS UI and battery life.

threeseed 1y ago
You can’t judge battery life and performance off a .0 release when the priority is on delivering features with the minimum number of showstopper bugs. At least wait until the .1. It has been like this for every Apple release for over 20 years.
- TylerE 1y ago
  Poor performance of a GUI is a showstopper bug. It should be, anyway.
- bigyabai 1y ago
  If Apple has been shipping betas for 2 decades that do not meaningfully prepare the release candidate for users, something is horribly wrong. They're either not listening to the feedback they receive or they're not giving themselves enough time; both are firmly within Apple's control.
  - 0x457 1y ago
    Well, firstly, this is a developer beta. So the target audience are developers that want to get a head start on getting their app(s) ready. So measuring battery performance of those dev betas is dumb. Also, they do listen to feedback and do gather it. They won't change entire design language now tho.

kevingadd 1y ago

Anyone who's ever written a blur shader knows that blurs aren't cheap.

andrewmcwatters 1y ago

Yes! And it was frustratingly patented! https://patents.google.com/patent/US7397964B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7397964B2/en I made a comment about this a couple of years ago, but I fudged the explanation of it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34937618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34937618 I suspect that their new technique implements the existing fast gaussian blur, and since the patent is about to expire, it was a good time to spice it up. I suspect as others have mentioned here, they use a "Liquid Glass" shader which samples the backing layer of the UI composition below the target element and applies a lens distortion based on the target element's border radius, all heavily parameterized so as to be used with the rest of the system's Liquid Glass applications like the new icon system.

rjmunro 1y ago

Surely it's a performance nightmare because whatever is behind the frosting has to be rendered in full. Without this it can see that it's occluded and not have to render. Or does MacOS not do that?

p_l 1y ago

Early iPhone hardware was barely keeping with rendering the UI with a total ban on transparency. Even on iPhone 4 which improved the hardware a lot had the issue that it also increased amount of pixels to be pushed around. And yes, later iOS on early hardware was huge PITA and slowdown.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]