Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

idiallo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 122 posts

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

#71

Post by latexr »

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

Alan Dye introduced the design by stating:

> Now, with the powerful advances in our hardware, silicon, and graphics technologies, we have the opportunity (…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGztGfRujSE&t=42s

Coupled with the reports of sluggish performance from the early betas, it’s understandable people would reach the conclusion that the new design pushes the hardware significantly more than before.

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

#72

Post by Luker88 »

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

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

#74

Post by Melatonic »

mort96 wrote: post #44
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'm inclined to believe what I have experienced. I have never before experienced my 2020 iPad Pro to be remotely slow. I use it for some web browsing and YouTube viewing, so I really don't need a lot of computing power. Now that I'm running the iOS 26 beta, I frequently feel animations going slowly or hitching. It's not terrible, but for the first time, I have the feeling that my experience using my iPad would be not…

Just turn them all off along with transparency and whatnot in the vision impaired setting. I believe there's also a setting for scrolling or how pages move back in forth (seems to be faster to me)

I always so this with all phones as it saves battery life and feels way snappier to me than some random animation between windows.

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

#75

Post by Melatonic »

arghwhat wrote: post #36
conradev wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem with these kinds of blur effects is not the cost of a gaussian blur (this isn't gaussian blur anyway as it has a lens effect near the edges). It's damage propagation and pipeline stalls. When you have a frosted glass overlay, any pixel change anywhere near the overlay (not just directly underneath) requires the whole overlay to be redrawn, and this is stalled waiting for the entire previous render pass to…

Thankfully you can probably turn it off as usual

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

#76

Post by ohdeargodno »

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.

>3rd party UI frameworks can't copy it without a massive performance hit.

Do you believe pixel shaders are some unique magic that only Apple has the secret sauce to and noone else can use? There were some efficient implementations of liquid glass for flutter before the iOS beta was even released. Glass effects are dime a dozen on shadertoy, they're one of the most basic effects you could learn to do when learning about texture sampling.

The platforms that will take a large performance hit are the ones that can't drop down to the native platforms, i.e. the web.

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

#77

Post by mort96 »

zuhsetaqi wrote: post #60
mort96 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm inclined to believe what I have experienced. I have never before experienced my 2020 iPad Pro to be remotely slow. I use it for some web browsing and YouTube viewing, so I really don't need a lot of computing power. Now that I'm running the iOS 26 beta, I frequently feel animations going slowly or hitching. It's not terrible, but for the first time, I have the feeling that my experience using my iPad would be not…

Beta versions are always slow and sluggish. Just install the latest beta of iPadOS 18. It will be sluggish. The reason is that in beta versions there is a lot of logging and reporting running in the background which can not be disabled.

We will see. It feels worse than earlier betas; I have always put the public betas on my iPad, and this is the first time we're this late in the cycle and my iPad feels too slow. But nothing would make me happier than if this all just goes away when iOS 26 is released properly and all animations run at a smooth 120 FPS again.

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

#80

Post by azangru »

bradhe wrote: post #17

Anyone else get strong GPT5 vibes from this article?

No. Could you try to put your finger on what exactly in this text gives you the vibes?

Also, a sibling comment suggests that "those tiles" is some sort of slop; but I find it no more sloppy than "this little web app" in the preceding sentence. Both are handwavy markers of imprecision common in oral speech. A comment on English Stack Exchange points out that this feature is referred to as the "indefinite this" [0].

[0] - https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/389637/using-thi...

Post reply on HN