Tesla’s new Model S will apparently play Witcher 3 on a built-in 10 teraflop gaming rig

If you can’t find a PS5 or Xbox Series X, how about an $80,000 electric sports car with comparable performance? Tesla just announced its refreshed Model S today, and a new “Plaid” powertrain isn’t its only performance enhancement — the company claims the car can now compete with next-gen gaming consoles, thanks to a 10-teraflop gaming computer that will apparently come with every new model.

Assuming that refers to GPU performance and Tesla isn’t wildly exaggerating, that might indeed be competitive with a PS5 or Xbox Series X, which offer 10.28 teraflops and 12 teraflops of raw GPU power respectively. There’s more to performance than teraflops, though.

Now, you might ask: who’s going to put a game in your car that might actually take advantage of a gaming PC? For that, I must ask you to look closely at the images above and below. Behold: CD Projekt’s acclaimed sword-slinging adventure The Witcher 3, just as Musk foretold:

Here are a number of things we still do not know:

• Is The Witcher 3 actually coming to Tesla, and when? (We’ve asked CD Projekt.)
• Can you play it on the 17-inch, 2200 x 1300-pixel main display, or only on the 8-inch second row display? Or both?
• Will you need a new controller? (Tesla says it has “wireless controller compatibility” but that’s all we know.)
• Who’s making the GPU? (We’ve pinged Nvidia and AMD.)
• Who is going to sit in their $80,000 sports car and play a 70+ hour game? (fingers crossed for cloud saves)
• Why not Cyberpunk? (Okay, this one’s a joke.)

You can see the claims for yourself at Tesla’s Model S website, though they’re a little buried: you have to go to the shop, scroll down to “Interior” and click on “Feature Details.”

Tesla’s been bringing games to its cars for a while now: we tried out Tesla Arcade on a Model 3 back in 2019, and both the first level of Cuphead and a car karaoke mode came to the company’s in-car software later that year. Fallout Shelter was added to the cars last year.