[fainpul]

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").

[DougBTX]

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.

[1718627440]

But when you only get redraw requests for what's actually visible. When the upper layers are transparent you constantly need to redraw everything.

[vrighter]

It needs to read more than one value. Otherwise blurring cannot happen. That's automatically more work. And also, considering the effect being physics based, even in your example, were it correct, calculating what n and m are is not trivial.

[DougBTX]

These UI elements (including the keyboard!) already blur their background, so that’s not a new cost. My 5 year old phone handles those fine. The distortion looks fancy, but since the shape of the UI elements is mostly-constant I’d expect them to be able to pre-calculate a lot of that. We’ll see when it ships!

[JKCalhoun]

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).

[sillywalk]

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.

[GCUMstlyHarmls]

Translucency.