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Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for

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Re: Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for

#21

Post by conradev »

depr wrote: post #11

I'm inclined to believe what 'mitchellh wrote: "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

I agree with Mitchell.

Gaussian blurs are some of the most expensive operations you can run, and Apple has been using them for a long time. They’re almost always downscaled because of this.

The first retina iPad (the iPad 3 if I recall) had an awfully underpowered GPU relative to the number of pixels it had to push. Since then, the processors have consistently outpaced pixels.

Your device is easily wasting more time on redundant layout or some other inefficiency rather than Liquid Glass. Software does get slower and more bloated over time, often faster than the hardware itself, not in the ways you might expect.

The GPU has so much headroom that they fit language models in there!

Re: Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for

#22

Post by [deleted] »

depr wrote: post #11

I'm inclined to believe what 'mitchellh wrote: "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

[deleted]

Re: Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for

#24

Post by arghwhat »

SoKamil wrote: post #7

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.

Blur is expensive because it propagates damage and has to wait for all previous rendering to be complete.

When one pixel changes underneath a blur the entire blurred area needs to be redrawn, meaning that all elements on top needs to be redrawn. As the blur cannot render before the underlay is finished, the graphics pipeline is stalled. Fancy blur look past the area immediately underneath to more accurately lens effects, meaning each output pixel reads a lot of input pixels.

When it comes to power and heat management, the goal is to be able to power the GPU down again as fast as possible, and this kind fo thing prolongs it quite a bit. There may be a point where efficiency makes the result acceptable, but it's always going to be much worse than not doing that.

Re: Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for

#27

Post by zarzavat »

theshrike79 wrote: post #4

IMO the actual reason for Liquid Glass is that they can do it natively. 3rd party UI frameworks can't copy it without a massive performance hit. This brings a more clear divide between fully native iOS applications and React Native -style "build once and cross-compile" -platforms.

If the native apps end up looking worse than the web apps then they played themselves...

Re: Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for

#28

Post by ccapitalK »

conradev wrote: post #21
depr wrote: post #11

I'm inclined to believe what 'mitchellh wrote: "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

I agree with Mitchell. Gaussian blurs are some of the most expensive operations you can run, and Apple has been using them for a long time. They’re almost always downscaled because of this. The first retina iPad (the iPad 3 if I recall) had an awfully underpowered GPU relative to the number of pixels it had to push. Since then, the processors have consistently outpaced pixels. Your device is easily wasting more time…

Gaussian Blur isn't the most efficient way of doing a frosted glass blur effect though. IIRC the current state of the art is the Dual Kawase blur, which is what KDE uses for its blurred transparency effect, I've never observed performance issues having it running on my machine.

Re: Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for

#29

Post by fainpul »

depr wrote: post #11

I'm inclined to believe what 'mitchellh wrote: "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 that's so, can't he explain it ELI5 style instead of calling people idiots?

I have a hard time believing that the GPU is somehow magically energy efficient, so that computing this glass stuff uses barely any energy (talking about battery drain here, not "unused cycles").

Re: Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for

#30

Post by thefz »

theshrike79 wrote: post #3
1oooqooq wrote: post #2

they already got caught artificially slowing older iphones on ios updates, remember that? this is a way to slow older models and get away with it.

It was a choice between two options in phones with bad batteries: - Slow down the phone so that it still works - Crash phone immediately Seems like the majority of people would've wanted option 2 for some strange reason? They did fix it by giving people the option, but I wonder how many still opted for "yes, I want my phone to suddenly just die instead of slowing down". And the fix for all this was a 50€ battery repl…

> It was a choice between two options in phones with bad batteries:

> - Slow down the phone so that it still works

> - Crash phone immediately

Three, actually:

   - Inform the user and provide decent repair and parts.
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