Tesla released their annual holiday update yesterday and one of the biggest new features was the integration of Steam’s extensive library of thousands of video games into the Tesla Arcade.
However, as suspected the addition was only for the refresh Model S and Model X that launched in mid-2021 with the new AMD Ryzen chip, which Tesla says is capable of providing up to 10 teraflops of processing power.
But in a bit of a twist Steam is not available in some of the earlier builds of these vehicles.
According to the release notes, Steam is currently only available for Model S and Model X cars with 16GB of RAM. Although the release notes don’t mention it, Steam also requires 256GB of storage.
These two pieces of hardware should be in almost all Model S/X built in 2022 as Tesla upgraded these cars from 8GB/128GB to 16GB/256GB in late January or early February.
For cars built with the previous hardware, there will be a retrofit option, according to CEO Elon Musk who said in a tweet on Tuesday night that one would be available, without specifying when it will be available or if there would be a cost associated with it.
Yes
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 14, 2022
If you are wondering why the Model 3 and Model Y, which also have the AMD Ryzen chip and 16GB of RAM, did not get Steam it is because these vehicles do not have a discrete GPU like Tesla’s flagship vehicles.
There is the possibility that Tesla could release a slimmed down version of Steam on these cars with games that require less computing power which the combined CPU and GPU could handle, but there has so far been no confirmation that something like this is in the works (but we can hope).
Along with Steam, Tesla also added Bluetooth controller support, but again only for the Model S/X.
You can check out Tesla’s video they released to showcase Steam in the Model S and Model X below.
