Which is silly. Filling a background with a texture or a solid color shouldn't make a difference.
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v7 UI Overhaul
- Thread starter caps04
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- Model S User Interface
Which is silly. Filling a background with a texture or a solid color shouldn't make a difference.
Gizmotoy
Active Member
HankLloydRight
No Roads
As Stoneymonster pointed out, this is not the reason and doesn't make sense. I don't think the processing power came up more than once or twice in the other thread and was also debunked there, too.
No, my (and many others') speculation is that the current trend in UI design is to go "flat" removing any shading, gradients, textures, and all visual cues that a button or UI element is actually a UI element. It's purely a UI design trend being led by Apple (just look at the latest iOS and OSX releases) and their war against skeuomorphism. Tesla (for some inexplicable reason) has decided that their otherwise clear and concise UI that have had in firmware 5 and 6 (and I guess since the Model was was released) needed to be "flattened" and most useful information stripped out to conform with the new trend. For instance, the analog speedometer, the analog power and regen meter are gone and replaced with a video-game like representation of the car and what's around it (obstenibly for AP enabled cars). The useful "information panel" along the bottom edge with Time, Temp, Date, odometer, etc has been removed... the "time" moved to an ugly and sparse analog clock in one of the two side panels (displacing any of the other panels one might want there). The regen meter is now overlaid on top of the power consumption graph in the side panel (which makes absolutely NO sense to me).
Like I said, this was all beaten to death in the other thread, so I'd suggest reading through that for lots of other opinions and discussion. And if you have more questions or want to discuss it further, please, let's keep it to one thread (the other one). Thanks.
Andyw2100
Well-Known Member
Not to split hairs and derail this thread any further(seeing that we don't have any new information) but with Tegra3(and a good majority of GPUs) that actually does make a difference. If the texture can't fit in the local cache it will have an impact on the memory system. A solid color just ends up being a nice uniform constant in the shader.
Given that the Tegra 3 has a single channel memory controller and is an immediate mode renderer this can have a significant overhead on fill rate.
True, I forgot about that. However clever tiling and procedural fading in a shader could solve that. They don't *have* to resort to solid colors.
Gizmotoy
Active Member
Hey, I try. It can be daunting to find anything in a 100-page thread, even after searching.
Jallum.pa.us
Member
You're overlooking the "read" side of the operation. Filling with a solid color doesn't require reading from a local texture buffer, or worse, from main memory. Depending on how the graphics chip is designed, copying a texture can take quite a bit longer than filling with a solid color.
They are Tegra 3's. They aren't the newest thing in the world but they should be able to handle a *background*.
This is silly speculation anyway. There are probably multiple reasons for the changes.
Yes. Unless they have the inexperienced graphics programmers, the Tegra 3 can definitely hand drawing the dash UI with a background texture.
Much of the background does not even update each frame. a procedural radiant with a smaller texture would look nice and cost virtually the same as a solid color.
The flat UI is a conscious choice of the UI programmer(s). Hopefully they eventually come around to something that is not so totally flat and boring (or at least give an option for more depth/texture). I really liked the version shown at the AutoPilot/D Event.
Sadly even when the Tegra3 came out it was back of the pack WRT other GPUs in the space.
I love the MS but it's really a shame they didn't go with a Adreno or PowerVR part. Really curious to see what they decided to use in the X(and if they went with a different part how they plan to handle diverging hardware capabilities)
I love the MS but it's really a shame they didn't go with a Adreno or PowerVR part. Really curious to see what they decided to use in the X(and if they went with a different part how they plan to handle diverging hardware capabilities)
Because the Tegra is a complete SOC and GPU and they probably were able to leverage a lot of reference board designs with the help of NVidia. Which do you want Tesla to be, a computer manufacturer or a car manufacturer?
Gizmotoy
Active Member
Perhaps not best to give them any ideas. They've already pulled just about everything possible in-house to an unprecedented scale among automakers.
Both of the other GPUs I've listed are only available as SOCs(with PowerVR from multiple vendors), there's really nothing special about the Tegra3. It was probably just a selection made on cost and Nvidia being close geographically to Tesla.
Yup, and if you look at GPUs from the lines I mentioned from that timeframe(say here GPU Performance - The Apple iPad Review (2012)) you'll see that Tegra3 really doesn't match up well. Esp in the fill rate tests where the Tesla puts the most hurt(being that it's a 1920x1200 panel, supposedly). It's a shame they didn't include the Adreno in that benchmark but the results are similar.
