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
Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for
101–110 of 122 posts
Re: Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
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").
Here's an attempt at that: The GPU is responsible for blending layers of the interface together. Liquid glass adds a distortion effect on top of the effects currently used, so that when the GPU combines layers, it takes values from (x + n, y + m) rather than just (x, y). Energy efficiency depends on how much data is read and written, but a distortion only changes _which_ values are read, not how many.
But when you only get redraw requests for what's actually visible. When the upper layers are transparent you constantly need to redraw everything.
Re: Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for
#103Earlier 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…
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.
> I believe there's also a setting for scrolling or how pages move back in fort
I'm struggling to parse that sentence, please elaborate.
Re: Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for
#104Anyone else get strong GPT5 vibes from this article?
Author here. No the article is not generated, it's dictated. This was more of a shower-thought (car thought I guess, since i was driving) that I dictated and fed to deepseek to punctuate and structure for myself. When it's a quick, short, unrefined article, I post it on the byte size section of my blog. So no, these are my words, and you can find it on some of my old comments where I mention how I've been testing AI editing and it's a hit or miss.
Re: Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
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").
My generous interpretation is that he means the GPU is magically energy efficient compared to the CPU. I wouldn't dispute that. But Apple went down that xPU-taxing path a long time ago when they added the blur to views beneath other views (I don't remember what that was called).
The translucency goes all the way back to the original Aqua interface in Mac OS X. I believe the compositing started getting some GPU acceleration (Quartz Extreme) in Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar all the way back in 2002.
Re: Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for
#106I'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…
That 2020 iPad didn't have an M SoC. That's a massive milestone upgrade in 2021.
Re: Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's an attempt at that: The GPU is responsible for blending layers of the interface together. Liquid glass adds a distortion effect on top of the effects currently used, so that when the GPU combines layers, it takes values from (x + n, y + m) rather than just (x, y). Energy efficiency depends on how much data is read and written, but a distortion only changes _which_ values are read, not how many.
But when you only get redraw requests for what's actually visible. When the upper layers are transparent you constantly need to redraw everything.
[deleted]
Re: Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> I believe there's also a setting for scrolling or how pages move back in fort I'm struggling to parse that sentence, please elaborate.
"move back and forth" I think is what they were going for, but proofreading isn't a thing anymore.
Re: Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are windowed GUIs still doing diffed screen updates? I would have assumed that GPUs make this kind of thing very unrewarding to implement as an optimisation. I'd imagine every window is being redrawn every frame as a 2D billboard with textures and shaders. The Guassian blur and lensing effects would still slow things down by needing to fetch pixels from the render target to compute the fragment, vs painting opaque pi…
The usual mechanism is to mark widgets that changed dirty, accumulate the bounding boxes of such dirty areas, take the next swapchain buffer and get its invalid regions, iterate through the widget tree and render anything that intersects with the bounding box or invalid regions, and submit the buffer + the dirty areas to the display server/driver. And yeah, having a render step depend on the output of a previous non-…
I was under the impression that for GPU accelerated GUIs, all windows are rendered to a render target. It might be that windows underneath have gone to sleep and aren't updating, but they would have their last state rendered to a texture. This permits things like roll-over previews and layered effects to have a more trivial overhead.
Software renderers typically do the optimisation you're suggesting to reduce on memory and CPU consumption, and this was a bigger deal back in the day when they were the only option. I think some VNC-like protocols benefit from this kind of lazy rendering, but the actual VNC protocol just diffs the entire frame.
On the GPU, the penalty for uploading textures via the bus negate the benefit, and the memory and processing burden is minimal relative to AAA games which are pushing trillions of pixel computations, and using GBs of compressed textures. GPUs are built more like signal processors and have quite large bus sizes, with memory arranged to make adjacent pixels more local to each other. Their very nature makes the kinds of graphics demands of a 2D GUI very negligible.