Isn’t this stuff mostly rendered by the GPU, and pretty efficiently?
I remember eye candy Linux desktop stuff like Enlightenment doing stuff like this back in the 90s and early 2000s. Not as pervasive or flashy but similar: lots of translucency, skins, themes, etc. Ran fine on a 400mhz machine, though at a much lower resolution.
It’s not free but I’m curious to see how significant it is. I also wonder if you can turn off the animated stuff.
The biggest gripe I have with the Tahoe shots I’ve seen is thst they seem to show it wasting more space with larger margins, etc. I hate that trend. I have a huge ultra wide monitor and often find myself wanting even more screen real estate while I’m working. Stop wasting my pixels.
Has anybody tested it yet? It is computed as GPU shader. I wonder if it is that less efficient compared to frosted glass blur effect that was there for at least a decade.
"The Liquid Glass effects are not expensive and anyone claiming they are has no idea how modern GPUs and animation work. Anyone saying it is is either just parroting or is an idiot."
Doesn't MacOS already render as 2x resolution and downsize in order to do font smoothing? Looks are important to Apple and I think they are willing to add custom hardware capable of handling these type of effects without killing battery life and CPU cycles.
The CPU processes draw calls and runs the compositor, and most compositors are fairly straightforward. The GPU runs the rasterisation, shaders, culling, occlusion, etc to achieve the effect.
It's sad that HN top nowadays has articles that are completely AI-edited or AI-generated, with the default style that's obvious to anyone who has used them for enough time.
The article says "M4 isn't using much CPU so let's add fancy effects."
There's some truth to that, in the sense of "the hardware can handle it now" (but he also mentions Vista, which came out like 20 years ago...)
If it's actually resource intensive, then the logic would probably be "let's make all last-gen devices a bit slower to encourage people to upgrade..."
At least, that's been my experience when upgrading iOS. It's basically the same thing except mysteriously way slower. (I wonder if the CPU throttling thing was part of the iOS upgrade that made my phone slow to a crawl a few years ago.)
I was under the impression that the iPhone had dedicated hw to render the screen while in idle/locked or something like that, in order to avoid waking the main cores.
I wonder if it had enough capabilities to run the extra passes needed for all that blur.
So the problem might not be that it makes things slow, but that it prevents low-power modes. AKA: slightly less battery life, possibly unused hardware
It's certainly not my experience that the M3 is overpowered for browsing. With the proliferation of SPAs for everything from messaging to word processing, my Macbook Air reminds me of a Chromebook in more ways than one.
Compiz was doing similar things (actually more and better things) in 2011 on the integrated intel gpus… i don’t think it’s much of a burden on modern gpus
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 39.1 ms ] threadthis is a way to slow older models and get away with it.
This brings a more clear divide between fully native iOS applications and React Native -style "build once and cross-compile" -platforms.
I remember eye candy Linux desktop stuff like Enlightenment doing stuff like this back in the 90s and early 2000s. Not as pervasive or flashy but similar: lots of translucency, skins, themes, etc. Ran fine on a 400mhz machine, though at a much lower resolution.
It’s not free but I’m curious to see how significant it is. I also wonder if you can turn off the animated stuff.
The biggest gripe I have with the Tahoe shots I’ve seen is thst they seem to show it wasting more space with larger margins, etc. I hate that trend. I have a huge ultra wide monitor and often find myself wanting even more screen real estate while I’m working. Stop wasting my pixels.
"The Liquid Glass effects are not expensive and anyone claiming they are has no idea how modern GPUs and animation work. Anyone saying it is is either just parroting or is an idiot."
https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1933314816472723728
If it can't be disabled and ends up crippling my otherwise perfectly adequate M1 it will accelerate me to switch to daily use of Asahi Linux.
Edit: That's assuming the effects are even expensive for the GPU.
Is it possible to turn the effects off? I mean something like accessibility settings to tone down the transparency and "glassiness"?
The CPU processes draw calls and runs the compositor, and most compositors are fairly straightforward. The GPU runs the rasterisation, shaders, culling, occlusion, etc to achieve the effect.
Works fine on my M1 Macs sooooo whatever.
I wonder if OP at least tested macOS Tahoe to base his impressions upon.
There's some truth to that, in the sense of "the hardware can handle it now" (but he also mentions Vista, which came out like 20 years ago...)
If it's actually resource intensive, then the logic would probably be "let's make all last-gen devices a bit slower to encourage people to upgrade..."
At least, that's been my experience when upgrading iOS. It's basically the same thing except mysteriously way slower. (I wonder if the CPU throttling thing was part of the iOS upgrade that made my phone slow to a crawl a few years ago.)
Wasn't that even before the beta was released...?
I wonder if it had enough capabilities to run the extra passes needed for all that blur.
So the problem might not be that it makes things slow, but that it prevents low-power modes. AKA: slightly less battery life, possibly unused hardware