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Older Tesla Vehicles To Get UI Performance Boost Thanks To Famed Video Game Engineer (electrek.co) 86

Tesla is working with famed video game engineer John Carmack to improve the interface performance in older vehicles. Electrek reports: Carmack is a legend in the video game world and in the broader computer science industry. He made important advancements in 3D computer graphics and was the lead programmer on game-changing video games like Doom and Quake. Later in his career, he focused his talents on virtual reality and became CTO of Oculus. More recently, he stepped down from his role at Oculus to focus on general artificial intelligence. In the 2000s, Carmack also had an interest in rocketry and started Armadillo Aerospace.

Several of these interests overlap with Elon Musk's, who has a lot of respect for Carmack and tried to hire him for a long time. While it doesn't sound like Musk has convinced him to come work with him just yet, Carmack confirmed that he is actually working on a Tesla product. Carmack drives a Tesla Model S, and he confirmed that he is working with Tesla engineers to improve interface performance: "I did kind of volunteer to help them fix what I consider very poor user interface performance on the older model S (that I drive). Their engineers have been sharing data with me." Tesla has had performance issues with its older media control unit found in older Tesla Model S vehicles. The automaker offers a media computer upgrade to improve performance, but you are stuck if you don't want to pay the $2,500 upgrade.

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Older Tesla Vehicles To Get UI Performance Boost Thanks To Famed Video Game Engineer

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  • Such as supporting the Rendition Vérité cards
    But when he get it right, he gets it quite right.

    • It wasn't a bad bet [vintage3d.org] for the time period.

    • Such as supporting the Rendition Vérité cards
      But when he get it right, he gets it quite right.

      Oh hell no, you didn't say that. I still have my Integraph Rendition Verite V1000 in the garage somewhere. 2D performance was OK, not the best but works fine. 3D performance was only second to the Voodoo 1. And because of the pass-through setup of the Voodoo 1, image quality was clearer on the Rendition. VQuake was great. I was getting better frame rate than Pentium Pro 200 Mhz on my Pentium 133Mhz with bilinear filtering. Tomb Raider, Mech Warrior 2, MDK, and NASCAR (bundled game) were good and ran well. I

      • by Z80a ( 971949 )

        The problem of the vérité was not the performance, but the manufacturing screw ups.

      • by Hodr ( 219920 )

        I spent 3 months on yahoo auctions before I finally "won" Orchid Righteous 3D (the first mass market 3DFX card) for $99. Playing Descent on that card literally made jaws drop every time I showed it off.

  • by Arethan ( 223197 ) on Tuesday August 24, 2021 @09:15PM (#61726981) Journal

    Both the summary and TFA (nearly the same, btw) simply say Carmack has been working with Tesla a bit on the UI performance.
    There is no mention of tangible results or even a hint that either of them are optimistic that an improvement is actually possible.
    This article is void of any substance. For all we know, Carmack looked at the specs over a weekend and will let them know in a few days that the hardware is hopelessly underpowered. A gaming analogy seems fitting here: You can't turn a Super Nintendo into an Xbox One.

    • However, the NES went from Mario 1 (Single Direction Left to right) to Mario 3 (Move in any Direction at any time) over its lifespan. The early Model S could easily have some bottle necks like it waits for the next update from the tires or something before rendering a frame. Your talking a mix of embedded and standard computing tech all working togeather to make the car work and a prototype only really worked on by Tesla it self. So he could easily find bottle necks and provide better ways to render thin
      • On the other hand, this was accomplished by going from Mario 1 running on the NES to Mario 3 running on the brand new processors and extra ram sitting in the cartridge, and using the NES hardware as a frame buffer and sound generator.
        • Okay, slow your roll kid. That's nonsense.

          Super Mario 3 was an MMC3 cartridge which provided some extra memory mapping facilities and the ability to set up a scanline interrupt. The extra RAM it contained was used to save game state (didn't you ever wonder how Super Mario 3 could save games?),

          The first example of what you're talking about was the Super FX RISC co-processor in the Starfox64 cartridge designed by Argonaut. It rendered polygons into an on-cartridge buffer which was then DMA'd over to the

    • It's probably the same idiocy that causes bad performance from apps on an Xbox One machine. I mean, I've seen some of these apps having trouble rendering a few dozen images on a machine that is easily capable of rendering a few million polys without breaking a sweat. You do this by creating roughly fifty abstraction layers between you and the hardware, and creating your app in JavaScript or some nonsense like that instead of using the native APIs like God intended to get reasonable performance.

      I wouldn't

      • I think Tesla is using C++/Qt.

        • Well, there goes my theory. It was good while it lasted.

          I wish Carmack luck, digging through Qt and trying find the slowdowns. He might have some luck if there's some really horribly-written rendering drivers slowing things down, which would be right in his wheelhouse.

          • by Anonymous Coward

            >Well, there goes my theory.
            Piffle. You can write dogshit code in C++ with a little effort, TYVM!
            Not that we needed any more convincing, but this is a yet another great example of how high-performance machines make it even easier for crummy programmers to produce bloated slow code that can't scale.
            Eventually someone (like Carmack) puts their foot down and says no, I won't just "throw more hardware at the problem." The mantra of terrible managers and terrible coders everywhere. It is especially galling to

      • by Tom ( 822 )

        You do this by creating roughly fifty abstraction layers between you and the hardware, and creating your app in JavaScript or some nonsense like that

        But... but... the computer studies 101 in the modern university of today teach to use abstraction and modules and small compact reusable units with detached interfaces, packaged in libraries that get bundled together in compact micro-apps which talk to each other via clear, generic interfaces using a well-defined common data exchange format!

        Heresy! Hang the witch!

    • A gaming analogy seems fitting here: You can't turn a Super Nintendo into an Xbox One.

      Game developers do, however, manage to squeeze more and more performance out of consoles as time progresses and they learn the tricks and shortcuts. Every generation has those games that are released a couple years in which everyone thought impossible performance-wise when the console came out.

    • Your comment is a prime example of saying true things and yet coming to a completely worthless conclusion.

      It would be surprising if there weren't opportunities for optimization in Tesla's software.

    • This is John Carmack we are talking about, he is one of the best programmers in the world and he is doing the very thing that made him so famous.

      Tesla hardware is not a SNES, it is (I think) a Tegra 3, maybe the best mobile SoC of 2011, its gaming performance is, I think, on the level of a Wii, but with HD capabilities.
      When we see electron apps, it is easy to forget how powerful modern hardware is. If the Tesla UI cannot run at 60 fps, single frame latency, it is only because of software, the question is on

  • Instead of just paying 2500$, ...

    Reminds me of the xkcd when circle tries to hack into linux kernel to override mute and force an audible alert instead of ringing the doorbell...

    • by N1AK ( 864906 )
      Or he just finds it to be an interesting "challenge" or is inquisitive... must be a sad world to live in where it's only worth doing something if it's financially beneficial.
  • I am sure that the older car owners will appreciate it if they do it, but along the same lines:

    Telsa has been promising that its cars will have FSD capability for a number of years now. I think at least as far back as 2017 and maybe sooner. In other words all that they were supposed to be lacking was a software upgrade to be released any time now.

    So how far back will the current generation FSD work without a hardware upgrade? I have a hard time believing that there has been not been any performance/c

    • by psergiu ( 67614 )

      FSD needs the 7 cameras that the newer ones have but the older Model S does not.
      Also the latest FSD computer - this one can be upgraded but the side cameras cannot be easily retrofit.

  • History shows [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnac_the_Magnificent] that Carnac will find the answer. Younger acolytes on this venue may not be aware of Carnac. "May the fleas of a thousand camels infest the crotch of the person seated next to me, and may his arms be too short to scratch" (sorry, you'll have to follow the link for that reference).

    If I have somehow misidentified the savior of Tesla's UI, please forgive...

  • Looks like programming all those hard checks for an AGI is a lot harder than Ctrl+C Ctrl+V some html and css.
  • Simply drive over some medical packs and armour shards.

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards. -- Aldous Huxley

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