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It’s technically impressive that they’re simulating the way light travels through glass. But a lot of the time it’s so subtle that I wonder if they could have j
by dabinat 1y ago
It’s technically impressive that they’re simulating the way light travels through glass. But a lot of the time it’s so subtle that I wonder if they could have just used simple semi-opacity and it would have had 85% of the same effect at a fraction of the CPU cycles.
- monster_truck 1y agoI feel like this is a big miss for them. Am I really supposed to believe that the company making its flagship phones burn at 14W to simulate the travel of light through glass for a UI actually cares about the planet?
- mananaysiempre 1y agoI strongly suspect (as I’ve said elsewhere) that there’s no simulation going on, just a bunch of precomputed refraction maps. Two dependent texture fetches are not nothing (and neither of course is the sequentializing nature of rendering a transparent thing over another thing), but I wouldn’t lose sleep over them if there was a point. Thus far I’m not convinced that there is. Has noöne located and disassembled the thing yet? The speculation is getting tiresome. (I don’t own an up-to-date macOS device and have never owned an iOS one, so no help from my end, sorry.)
- monster_truck 1y agoAin't no way precomputed reflection maps are burning through the full TDP of the processor. Even the desktop experience is miserable perf-wise
- itopaloglu83 1y agoFor those who hasn’t seen it, just dropping down the control center consumes 14 watts of CPU/GPU power as demonstrated by various YouTube videos.
- arghwhat 1y agoI seriously doubt they're doing anything more than a boring shader with some decent approximation. We can stimulate light, but that's just a waste of ray tracing and introducing annoying complexities.
- pointlessone 1y agoThey probably do because the effect can be pretty closely recreated with a displacement map in SVG.
- ASalazarMX 1y agoI agree. Actual simulation would be an inexcusable waste of resources when the end result is simply indistinguishable from a normal distortion filer. Specially when their newest flagship has a smaller battery.
- clickety_clack 1y agoIf you assume a fixed depth “behind” the screen and a fixed eye position, a lot of the math shakes out. It’s overkill for button backgrounds, but the actual implementation of a simplified simulation isn’t as computationally heavy as I think you’re imaging.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Gigachad 1y agoI'm not sure how but it doesn't seem to use that much processing power. My 5 year old apple watch seems to render the glass UI fairly well and I assume this thing has the bare minimum processing power.
- dlivingston 1y agoIt's a GPU shader(s), so you'd have to measure its resource usage indirectly (device heating up; shorter battery life).
- bathtub365 1y agoiOS has been applying a gaussian blur to various UI layers for years so there likely isn’t a big incremental performance hit for this graphical effect
- philistine 1y agoWhy do you insist that the Watch uses the same exact code to render the glass?
- DecentShoes 1y agoYes but that wouldn't slow down their older devices enough to make people buy new ones