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Tesla's Model S/X refresh reveals The Witcher 3 in its Arcade offerings

Along with a host of new features, the newest versions of the Model S and Model X will be offering higher-fidelity gaming experiences.

Chris Jarrard

January 27, 2021 5:15 PM

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Electric auto giant Tesla took the wraps off the newest versions of its popular Model S and Model X vehicles this afternoon. Along with styling changes and drivetrain modifications, the interiors of the electric cars are also in for an upgrade. The Tesla Arcade, which allows gaming directly from the vehicle’s infotainment system, appears to be receiving a serious upgrade as well. In the pictures Tesla provided of the revamped Model S interior, CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher 3 can be seen on the carousel of available titles.

The Tesla Arcade first launched back in 2019 and offered owners the chance to unwind in their electric cars with a curated selection of games. Most of the game assortment was lighter fare, either mobile ports or titles that had very modest hardware requirements. The Witcher 3 is anything but modest with its hardware requirements, needing a beefy PC to max out and is still capable of bringing both the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X to their knees. It was considered a minor miracle when the sprawling RPG debuted on Nintendo’s Switch handheld console in 2019. To get such a piece of software running natively, the new Tesla infotainment system must be packing some absolute beef..

The official landing page for the Model S refresh touts an infotainment system powered by a 10-teraflop GPU. Details are nearly nonexistent at the moment and there is no word on who is producing the GPU used in these new electric vehicles, though it presumably has to come from either NVIDIA or AMD. 10 teraflops would put the Tesla infotainment system in the neighborhood of the PS5 and Xbox Series X, assuming an apples-to-apples comparison (though teraflop performance by itself rarely tells the whole story). Undoubtedly, some of that horsepower would be dedicated to the autonomous driving system in these Tesla whips. 

These refreshed models are expected to arrive sometime later this year. The refreshed Plaid+ Model S variant starts at $139,000, so you might as well pre-order two of them in case you need to run your Tesla Arcade games in SLI.

Chris Jarrard

Contributing Tech Editor

Chris Jarrard likes playing games, crankin' tunes, and looking for fights on obscure online message boards. He understands that breakfast food is the only true food. Don't @ him.