Yup, you read that right. Tesla (fresh from its earnings call where it posted a record quarterly revenue) showed off its updated Model S and while the car itself is certainly jaw-dropping, what caught our attention is the gaming rig that Model S will reportedly ship with.
The new Model S will apparently have a 10-teraflop (TFLOPS) gaming pc built right into the car and one that can apparently play Witcher 3. Now the first question you might ask is what exactly is a TFLOP? A teraflop is a mathematical measure of a device’s performance; specifically, its ability to calculate one trillion floating points per second. The higher the number, the better the performance, theoretically at least.
Now, why is it such a big deal to have a 10-TFLOP gaming machine in a car? To put things into perspective, the Xbox Series X and Sony’s PS5 both have a TFLOP rating of 12 and 10. This means the new Model S, theoretically, stands toe to toe with the PS5 when it comes to gaming performance. Of course, there is more to performance than just raw TFLOPS. You also must keep in mind the memory bandwidth and the clock rates for the compute units. But without getting too technical, Tesla is claiming you can play the Witcher 3 on this thing.
When it was released, Witcher 3 was the benchmark darling for a lot of new graphics cards that came out close to its release and now years later, it still holds up as a somewhat demanding game. Now it is one thing to enjoy The Witcher 3 on a high-end PC but totally another to play it in the back of your car. Tesla has not revealed what the components for its gaming rig are besides giving us a ballpark value of 10 TFLOPS. There also has not been any confirmation from CD Projekt Red, the developers who made Witcher 3, that the game is coming to Tesla’s gaming platform. All we have to go on is promotional material and Musk’s tweet.
Want to play The Witcher game on your Tesla? (you can already watch the show on Tesla Netflix theater)— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 22, 2020
If anything, this just makes me appreciate Saber interactive even more. They had the unenviable job of cramming the entirety of Witcher 3 onto Nintendo’s Switch, which by comparison runs at 1 TFLOPS. Let that sink in.
