New Xbox and PlayStation consoles might be short supply, but if you are really desperate for some next-generation gaming performance and have a lot of money to spend, then Tesla may have the answer for you. If you can afford to buy a Tesla that is, then money shouldn’t be an issue for you. Plus it still beats paying PS5 scalper prices.
Tesla has announced a newly refreshed Model S today and while it comes with a lot of great car stuff, we’ll leave that for the motoring websites to get excited about. What caught our attention was that the car will include a 10-teraflop gaming computer that will apparently come with every new model. Now what exactly Tesla means about 10-teraflop gaming performance and how it makes this up between CPU and GPU performance isn’t clear, but it should come close to matching the 10.28 teraflops and 12 teraflops of raw GPU power respectively available on the PS5 and Xbox Series X respectively. With three displays in the car, there is a lot of additional display processing that the car will need to do that requires that much PC horsepower.
That is an impressive entertainment system built into the car and while Musk himself teases that it could play The Witcher 3, it’s not clear exactly what software or controllers it will support and what type of games it can play. Doom’s a safe bet though.
If Tesla is trying to make a completely new platform, it might be difficult to get developers to put in the effort to work on these new cars, so the car will likely run on a version of Windows and some form of Android support.
Gaming might seem an odd thing for a car to do, though I guess if you desperately need to keep the kids busy on a long trip, it could certainly come in handy. I fear many adults may want to take the backseats themselves or get potentially too distracted by the gaming pursuits while driving. I guess once Tesla works out all of the self-driving kinks, then this could certainly be a good draw.
At $80 000 (R1.2 million) plus import taxes for a new Tesla, this is definitely only something for the extremely wealthy, but perhaps a sign of the future where our cars will become the next smart devices that we use to integrate our life with and get entertainment from. Just please don’t drive and game because we know there will be idiots that will try and do this.
Last Updated: January 29, 2021
konfab
January 29, 2021 at 04:21
It wouldn’t surprise me if they put this GPU in the car for doing inference for their self-driving capability
HvR
January 29, 2021 at 04:31
No, would be a complete separate system for safety reasons.
Iskape
January 29, 2021 at 04:58
IMHO, once autonomous driving really becomes a thing, I can definitely see some of us getting in a quick game of Warzone on the way to work.
Gavin Mannion
February 1, 2021 at 00:33
This is stupid and I hate it….