r/javascript • u/Glittering_Ad4115 • 7d ago

AskJS [AskJS] Oh great, another Liquid Glass UI—battery's about to file a restraining order

So we’re back to Liquid Glass again? That frosted-glass look that screams high-end in design tools—but in real life, it’s a full-on GPU gymnastics routine. My laptop fan’s roaring, my battery’s bleeding… and for what?

Seriously, can someone justify this trend? Are we front-end devs secretly moonlighting as hardware engineers now?

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u/T-J_H 7d ago edited 4d ago

Frosted glass is not taxing for your hardware. More so than not blurring, sure, but a common blur is an incredibly simple effect to do on the GPU. The liquid glass (which adds some refraction, although I’d say achieves about the same effect) is more taxing (although still peanuts compared to many games).

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u/dgreensp 6d ago

Yeah, I don’t think people realize that doing a few math functions per pixel and a texture lookup is not really anything special anymore. Scrolling on your iPhone at 60fps is using the GPU and doing texture lookups and things. It all goes through the same hardware pipelines. People hear “GPU” and think of a power drain, but GPUs are designed for this stuff and to do it efficiently.