Elon Musk has revealed on Twitter that there are plans being developed to expand the gaming capabilities of the Tesla infotainment system, including the ability to add support for Steam.
Musk confirmed in his Tweet that his team are also currently working on both specific title support after expressing on a post from CDProjekt Red’s official Cyberpunk 2077 account that it was a ‘great game’ which prompted another user to asky when the Sci-Fi RPG would be arriving on either the Tesla Model S or Model X.
Considering that Steam has a 50,000 game library, Musk has claimed that this would be “obviously where we should be long-term”. The updated infotainment system for Tesla vehicles features a 17-inch display and contains AMD Navi 23 graphics. Tesla has kept the details of this AMD GPU a closely guarded secret, but it’s currently rumored that it features around 28 Compute Units clocked up to 2.8 GHz.
We’re working through the general case of making Steam games work on a Tesla vs specific titles. Former is obviously where we should be long-term.February 22, 2022
If true, this would suggest that the Tesla infotainment system is capable of providing up to 10 teraflops of computing power – which isn’t far off the 10.28 teraflops boasted by Sony’s PS5. It’s little wonder then that Musk has previously teased other games would be playable on the EV from the CDProjekt Red library – namely The Witcher 3.
It’s likely that Tesla can piggyback off the hard work already completed by Valve to support as much of the full Steam library as possible on its upcoming Steam Deck console, which is based on the same AMD RDNA2 architecture. Large games like God of War, which was recently released for the PC platform, are able to run astonishingly well on the Valve handheld, which sets some lofty expectations for the Tesla infotainment system.
No date has been set for any of these developments, and that’s if they even make it past…. well, development. Updates are expected to Tesla Arcade for the Model X and Model S, but again, no arrival date has been set so it’s likely we won’t see any of these features implemented until around 2023.
Opinion: Am I a car, or am I a console?
Maybe I’m getting old and boring, but my first reaction to reading Musk’s tweet was “…why?”.
PC gaming on a handheld has a lot more appeal given you could take the Steam Deck anywhere, but porting the entire Steam library to a car feels a tad perplexing. The wise words of Dr Ian Malcom ring true -they’ve spent so much time thinking whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.
Give me the option of playing Cyberpunk 2077 on a console (or PC), a handheld or…well, a car and the first will always win. It may have its uses if you’re stuck waiting in your vehicle while parked, but this all feels like a wasted effort if you won’t find yourself in that scenario very often.
That said, I don’t own a Tesla. Perhaps this is a feature that’s in especially high demand from folks who actually own and drive the EVs. If this is an easy implementation then it’s a no-brainer to add Steam to the Tesla range, even if only for marketing material – a car with the gaming capabilities of a current-gen console is obviously going to get some attention, though I’d be interested to know if it will be disabled automatically when the vehicle is in motion.
If developing Steam support isn’t going to be a simple task though, Tesla may find that time is better spent fixing the issues blighting its self-driving system rather than trying to attract new customers with the promise of a 50k game library.
Via VideoCardz
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