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This is also likely a performance nightmare. Funny that they mention that "new hardware has enabled us to..." which means that this will perform poorly on old d
by austinl 1y ago
This is also likely a performance nightmare. Funny that they mention that "new hardware has enabled us to..." which means that this will perform poorly on old devices.
At a previous company, we were forbidden from using translucency (with a few exceptions) because of the performance cost of blending. There are debugging tools we'd use fairly often to confirm that all layers were opaque.
- c-hendricks 1y agoThese transparency effects have been in macOS, ipadOS, iOS, and tvOS for years though?
- landl0rd 1y agoThere's a difference between something like a transparent background (you can run i3/picom on a potato) and having to composite many little UI elements to render a frame.
- gmueckl 1y agoI can think of a couple of creative ways to dramatically optimize rendering of these effects. There is probably quite some batching and reordering possible without affecting correctness.
- landl0rd 1y agoCeteris paribus your performance is always going to be substantially worse even with tons of fancy tricks. Those also get much harder to implement when you're building a complete UI toolkit that has to support a ton of stuff rather than just writing first-party apps/OS components.
- gmueckl 1y agoI think that the batching that I have in mind would work especially well with complex layouts. The thing to realize is that even if you have tons of elements on a screen, their visual components aren't actually stacked deeply in most cases and the type and order of applied effects is quite similar for large groups of elements. This allows for pretty effective per-level batching in hierarchies, even if elements don't have the same parents.
- chrisweekly 1y ago"ceteris paribus" - "all else equal"
- landl0rd 1y agoRight. My point is the response to this is "well if we optimize it more we'll improve performance", but oftentimes if you optimized the existing code you would also improve performance. Your end state is still worse.
- gmueckl 1y agoIs it really worse if the GPU spends maybe 0.5ms more per frame on these effects? I'd be surprised if a good implementation adds much more to the per frame rendering time.
- butlike 1y agoThanks. Wasn't familiar with that latin
- blinding-streak 1y agoThe reality distortion field is back, it seems.
- slt2021 1y agothese performance hungry "improvements" are forcefully introduced to legitimately slow down older devices and force the device refresh across the user base. I have been using 8 year old iPhone just fine, but features like these over time will make the experience slower and slower and slower, until I am forced to refresh my iphone
- mikestew 1y agoAnd you base your first sentence on…? Surely not the ol’ “my phone slows down when my battery is failing so that I’ll buy a new phone” canard? To be clear, these are new features that will likely have a setting to turn off. There’s no conspiracy, nothing “forcefully” added for the purpose of driving upgrades. (Ah, ninja edit): There’s not even a guarantee these features will be supported on an eight year old phone. EDIT: wait a minute...your eight year old phone won't even be supported. (EDIT: reworded first paragraph to account for the ninja edit.)
- hshdhdhj4444 1y agoWhat’s the exact canard here? It’s a legitimate concern even assuming good intent. But Apple has had to publicly admit bad intent specifically with their batteries and had to offer people money etc. Strange to criticize people for something Apple publicly admitted they did wrong.
- mikestew 1y agoApple publicly admitted they did wrong. When is the last time a company has admitted wrong-doing? No, Apple admitted to slowing down phones when the battery was shot so it wouldn’t just suddenly shut down. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate
- slt2021 1y agothe solution to old battery is $15 replacement battery, not the $1500 replacement iPhone. which I am doing exactly, but still new iOS version make my phone slower and slower and I cannot even opt out of updates. because some apps are forcing me to use the latest version of iOS (Authentication, Okta 2fa, etc)
- Synaesthesia 1y agoModern iOS and Mac devices have plenty of GPU power for a shader effect. They already do one with the translucent blue.
- Macha 1y agoMeh, Vista laptops could run lots of translucency fine (well as long as they were actualy Vista era laptops and not just XP era laptops with Vista installed)
- dylan604 1y agoIt's almost like they said the same thing: Funny that they mention that "new hardware has enabled us to..." oh wait. it's not like they did. they did say it.
- slt2021 1y agoyou just proved that MSFT released slow OS to force people refresh hardware. Plus, vista was released in 2007, XP SP2 (the most popular version) was in 2004. so its like ~3 years diff. So its not like hardware has progressed in 3 years, its more like new software got significantly slower
- hajile 1y agoI don't think upgrading was the reason for Vista performance. MS wasn't in the hardware business back then (and is just a marginal player even today). They WAY overreached in their goals with Longhorn. When they finally decided to cut back features to something actually attainable, they didn't have enough time to make a high-performance OS. Windows 7 was a well-loved rebrand of what was essentially just a Windows Vista service pack and improved performance (though it was still too heavy for a lot of the older machines people tried to upgrade to Vista). If they'd have cut back on their goals earlier, Windows 7 is likely a lot closer to what would have shipped as Vista.
- p_l 1y agoA lot of problems was simply a fight with device makers and shit drivers, to be quite honest. Windows 7 benefited from coming later with Vista being the battleground in which vendors were forced to update to NT6.0 models.
- nikeee 1y ago> Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
- jmrm 1y agoI think brand most recent iPhones are ridiculously powerful for their average use, so I don't think this would be an issue. For older models, on the other hand, it would be an issue, and will put pressure to people to buy a new one.
- WhyNotHugo 1y agoWindows Vista introduced this same concept. Performance was awful unless you had compatible graphics acceleration. 20 years later, I think most devices should be fine, especially Apple devices.
- chasil 1y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero
- p_l 1y agoVista was dogged by issues caused by migrating display drivers from NTDDM to WDDM 1.0, something that was only finished by 7 (which dropped NTDDM fully and introduced WDDM 1.1) and 8 (which afaik had mandated WDDM 1.1 only). Unlike previous GDI acceleration, DWM.EXE could composite alpha channel quickly with the GPU, and generally achieved much higher fill rates on the same hw - if the drivers worked properly.
- krferriter 1y agoYeah one of the easiest ways to make windows vista+7 perform better was to simply disable all the fancy UI graphics that add nothing. I don't care if my window title bars have a gradient and animated transparency. It's actually a bit distracting and makes the system perform worse, so I just turned it off. Even on modern devices though which have more computation and graphics power to the point that they aren't going to actually lag or anything while rendering it, why waste cycles and battery animating these useless and distracting things? There's no good justification.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago20 years later and they're building the start menu in React Native.
- ricardobeat 1y agoUnlikely. Frosted glass blur was introduced almost twelve years ago in iOS 7, and was supported all the way down to the iPhone 4. Many apps like control center have used a full screen blur without any performance issues for a long time. Apple at the time created their own 'approximate gaussian blur' algorithm specifically to enable this, and it ran crazy fast on devices where a simple gaussian blur would barely achieve double digit FPS. Even if this 'liquid glass' effect is heavier to compute, on the hardware we have today it will be a negligible performance concern.
- mholt 1y agoThis isn't just a gaussian blur though, there's raytracing and refractions happening. The OS is becoming a low-key high-fidelity video game.
- gfody 1y agoit looks like old school 2D bumpmapping to me, it's not expensive if you don't overengineer it
- seemack 1y agoFrom what I've seen,the refractions happen in predictable contexts so I suspect that they'll be able to create shaders, etc that will limit the performance hit
- AlienRobot 1y ago
- cryptonector 1y ago> Funny that they mention that "new hardware has enabled us to..." which means that this will perform poorly on old devices. They're going to backport this? I seriously doubt it.
- abhinavk 1y agoIt runs on iPhone 11 and later.
- RollingRo11 1y agoCurrently replying from my iPhone 16 pro (granted, not old by any means) on the iOS 26 dev beta. MOST things actually feel smoother/snappier than iOS 18. Safari is a joy to use from a performance perspective. It’s in beta so ofc I’m getting a ton of frame hitches, overheating, etc. but my summarized initial thoughts are “it’ll take some getting used to, but it feels pretty fast”
- dmix 1y ago> MOST things actually feel smoother/snappier than iOS 18 I have a feeling the whole smooth animations thing contributes to this a lot. Obsessing about the reaction time and feeling of how stuff comes on the screen. But yeah iPhone 16 pro is probably a bad performance test case
- whynotminot 1y agoReal test probably iPhone 12 Pro. Anecdotally, I still see a tonnn of those in the wild.
- andrekandre 1y ago> It’s in beta so ofc I’m getting a ton of frame hitches, overheating how is battery-life?
- tempodox 1y agoSince overheating was already mentioned, I give you one guess how that affects battery life.
- RollingRo11 1y agoAfter using it for a couple more days, battery life hasn't really changed from 18. I'm tempted to say that it's better but I don't want to make any claims before I actually track battery life across a week and compare it to my battery life pre-update. The overheating is a common occurrence, but it doesn't persist. It seems to be certain things (setting the animated backgrounds in iMessage is a good example), but the moment I'm not doing one of those things the temp feels fine. My battery does drop a percent or two during those cases (which sucks), but my typical use of the phone hasn't yielded any noticeable battery life loss compared to 18.5
- raydev 1y ago> this will perform poorly on old devices I don't know how long you've been following Apple but with previous "high cost on old hardware" features they just disabled them for old hardware. Apple loves their battery life numbers, they won't purposefully ship a UI feature that meaningfully reduces them. Now bugs that drop framerates and cause hangs, they love shipping those.
- lxgr 1y ago> Apple loves their battery life numbers For devices currently being sold, primarily.
- Gigachad 1y agoMaybe in the past, but my iPhone 13 still has pretty good battery life considering the battery has physically degraded over the years. No update felt like it killed the battery.
- usefulcat 1y agoEh, I use an iPhone 11 that's 5.5 years old, with the original battery and to this day the battery life is not noticeably different from when it was new. It's the first iPhone I bought and has lasted longer than any of the three Android phones I had before it.
- wooger 1y agoLiterally impossible for your battery life not to have degraded in 5.5 years, battery tech just degrades - my 14 Pro was noticably worse in less than a year.
- usefulcat 1y agoHence the use of 'noticeably', as opposed to 'measurably'. There's no point in arguing about subjective experience.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
- drob518 1y agoThese modern chips have so much graphics processing capability, I think they just throw the problem at the hardware and let it do its thing.
- solfox 1y agoIt may not be overt, but it also seems they are working to justify the hardware with the software.
- drob518 1y agoYes, but I think it’s about giving the consumer “more” so that the upgrade train doesn’t stall out and stop moving. They need everyone upgrading iPhones every 3 years and,people won’t do that for just an abstract “it’s faster.”
- david-gpu 1y ago> At a previous company, we were forbidden from using translucency (with a few exceptions) because of the performance cost of blending. I imagine this was on mobile devices. Blending was relatively expensive on GPUs from Imagination Technologies and their derivatives, including all Apple GPUs. This is because these GPUs had relatively weak shader processors and relied instead on dedicated hardware to sort geometry so that the shader processor had to do less work than on a traditional GPU. Other GPUs vendors rely more on beefier shader processors and less on sorting geometry (e.g. Hierarchical-Z). This turned out to be a better approach in the long term, especially once game engines started relying on deferred shading anyway, which is in essence a software-based approach that sorts geometry first before computing the final pixel colors.
- nyarlathotep_ 1y ago> At a previous company, we were forbidden from using translucency (with a few exceptions) because of the performance cost of blending. There are debugging tools we'd use fairly often to confirm that all layers were opaque. I feel like a few years back when I still used an Intel macbook i noticed an increase in battery life and less frames dropping (like during 'Expose' animations) by disabling transparency in Accessibility settings. I think this was after the BIg Sur update.
- skhr0680 1y agoTranslucency being a main feature of Mac OS X is decades old at this point. I remember a magazine article touting it as an advantage over the upcoming release of Windows XP!
- hombre_fatal 1y agoThis reminds me of disabling the Windows Vista translucent UI to claw back performance on my crappy Gateway laptop in uni.
- illiac786 1y agoInterestingly, in iOS 18, suppressing transparency (there’s a setting for it) makes performance worse, not better. The UI lags significantly more with transparency disabled. I expect it will be the same with iOS 26: there will be setting to reduce the transparency (which I find highly distracting) but it will make performance actually worse…
- krferriter 1y agoDid suppressing transparency also turn on processor throttling or something too? Like putting the device in a power saver mode?
- illiac786 1y agoMy phone is always in power save mode. Re-enabling transparency actually made the UI less jerky. It was mostly the keyboard that became unresponsive, I could type 15-20 letters while it froze and it would then „catch up“. Also reported here for example: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255911835 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255911835 Re-enabling transparency improved this a lot, also keyboard still hangs a bit from time to time. I’m always in power save mode, on an iPhone 12, running iOS18.
- citrin_ru 1y agoThanks for this insight. It's very counter intuitive. Normally transparency is additional work for a GPU. I had "Reduce Transparency" check-box in settings turned on because I distaste semit-transparent interfaces. Was not noticing performance problems except one application - Ogranics Maps which were unusably slow after switching to another app and returning to maps so I had to restart it freqently (swipe up). I was thinking that the problem is with Ogranics Maps code. After seeing this comment re-enabled transparency (iOS default) and Ogranics Maps working fast even if I switch between Organic Maps and other apps!
- illiac786 1y agoIt potentially only applies to older iPhones, I have an iPhone 12, what’s yours? Also reported here for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1d2ncvu/if_your_older_iphone_on_ios_17_is_running_slow/ https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1d2ncvu/if_your_old...
- arvinsim 1y ago> This is also likely a performance nightmare. Funny that they mention that "new hardware has enabled us to..." which means that this will perform poorly on old devices. Not sure if it is planned obsolescence but it certainly is an upsell to upgrade.