Earlier this year, Elon Musk confirmed that Tesla’s development team was working on integrating the in-vehicle entertainment system with Steam, but didn’t have a forecast for when the feature would be released.
Given that Sony has partnered with Honda to integrate the PS5 into its future releases, it looks like Musk decided it was time to speed things up and launched Steam integration with Tesla cars this week.
Owners of Tesla Model S and X received a “Christmas update” this week that allows Valve’s platform games to now run directly through the vehicle’s entertainment system.
Basically, the update brings a lot of new features, but the main highlight is the integration of the Steam store, which, in case you didn’t know, is best known for selling AAA PC games. Now the real question is, are Tesla vehicles really capable of running modern AAA games?
Bearing in mind that the Tesla Model S and X are equipped with an AMD Ryzen processor and an AMD RDNA 2 GPU, they are certainly capable of running the heaviest games. In fact, Tesla itself showed a video of one of the vehicles running Cyberpunk 2077 on the touch screen and considering that this is a very demanding game, where many PCs cannot run it, the performance in the vehicle was quite impressive.
Through the update notes, we discovered that the Steam used in Tesla is not the Windows version, but the Linux version, which is the same one used in Steam Deck, Valve’s portable console.
This allows games like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Red Dead Redemption 2, God of War, Elden Ring, Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered and many others that are optimized for the Steam Deck to run acceptably on vehicles.
The news is certainly very exciting, but now, it remains to be seen how this will impact drivers and whether a distraction as big as this one will not increase the number of accidents.
What do you think of this news?
Update (07/18/2022) – GS
Elon Musk Talks Progress on Launching Steam Games on Tesla Cars
Even though Elon Musk is involved in a major legal problem with the withdrawal in the acquisition of Twitter, the tycoon still seems to be finding time to take care of his other businesses, including Tesla, maker of electric vehicles and autonomous functions.
At the beginning of the year, Musk showed interest in integrating Tesla car systems with Steam games and this week, he returned to talk about the subject.
On Twitter, the Tesla Owners Silicon Valley profile, dedicated to drivers who own a company car, shared the curiosity about Tesla cars being also a video game console.
My kids love the awesome games on our Tesla. Tesla makes a mobile phone on wheels that only gets better with time.
In response, Musk revealed that they are making progress on integrating with Steam and that a demo should be released next month.
We’re making progress with Steam integration. Demo probably next month.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 15, 2022
We still don’t know how this integration will work, allowing all games in the Steam catalog or even direct purchase by vehicles, but in any case, we hope that this does not become a problem for traffic, as it happened last year.
Original text – 02/23/2022
Steam games can be run on Tesla cars, says Elon Musk
Last year, Tesla was involved in a controversy over PassengerPlay, a feature that offers some video games through the car’s dashboard. At the time, some users reported that they could play while the car was moving, which could result in serious accidents.
Even with all this controversy when uniting video games and cars, Elon Musk, owner of the brand, seems not to have given up and intends to further expand the catalog of games in Tesla vehicles.
When asked by a Twitter user, Elon Musk confirmed that his team has been working on supporting Steam games on Tesla cars, instead of focusing on just a few games, as was the initial plan. Despite this, the executive points out that it should still take a long time for Steam support to happen in cars.
Valve has been working hard to support as many games as possible on Steam Deck, which is a platform based on Linux. It turns out that this effort by Valve can also benefit Tesla, as the vehicle’s dashboard also has architecture based on AMD RDNA2, which limits the time required for the graphics drivers to work.
We’re working through the general case of making Steam games work on a Tesla vs specific titles. Former is obviously where we should be long-term.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 22, 2022
According to Videocardz, Tesla has updated its infotainment tools with a 17-inch screen and 2200×1300 resolution. The system features a Navi 23 graphics card, which delivers up to 10 TFLOPs of power. The exact configuration of the card is unknown, but GPU Navi 23 should have 28 processing units tuned to 2.8 GHz. A teardown video released earlier this year confirmed that Tesla’s new interface has an integrated Ryzen CPU, being a quad-core CPU.
The company plans to update Tesla’s Arcade system for the Model X, Model S and Cybertuck, which hits the market in 2023.
And you, do you think this idea of ​​putting games in cars will work?