Tesla has been spending a lot of money on incorporating video games into its in-car entertainment system over the past few years, so many people were surprised when the company announced earlier this year that it intended to go as far as integrating Valve’s Steam, an online video game store and distribution platform, in its vehicles.
A significant boost in the number of video games that can be played inside Tesla vehicles would arise from the integration of Steam into Tesla’s EVs.
Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk stated in July that a demo of the Steam integration should be available by August. Although that didn’t materialize, Musk repeated his intention to incorporate the video game library into Tesla cars.
Today, Tesla launched Steam Beta for Model S and Model X as part of its “holiday update”:
We covered every aspect of Tesla’s holiday update earlier today for the majority of Tesla models, but the Steam integration is only available for the updated Model S and Model X made in the past two years.
This is due to the fact that Tesla’s two top models are fitted with a more potent entertainment computer intended for video games.
Tesla introduced the new gaming computer at the same time as the new Model S and Model X were unveiled:
Tesla Arcade offers in-car gaming comparable to the most recent consoles thanks to processing power of up to 10 teraflops. Gaming is possible from any seat thanks to wireless controller compatibility.
Patrick Schur, a reputable chip leaker, published a schematic of the upcoming gaming computer from Tesla that uses the AMD Navi 23 GPU:
The system is integrated and connects directly to two touchscreens inside the Model S and Model X to play games, watch entertainment, and perform other functions.
Musk also revealed that the new computer has more storage space to be able to handle more games on the platform at the same time, which is going to be useful to handle your Steam library.
The website videocardz compared the specs with existing consoles from the latest generation – showing that it does indeed match up well based on the specs available:
As we previously reported, Tesla has a team of software engineers working on video games in Seattle, and it more recently started building a similar team in Austin.
The automaker believes that with the advent of self-driving, entertainment – including video games – will become more important inside vehicles.
