Tesla to Switch to Unreal Engine for Improved FSD Visualizations
A seemingly behind-the-scenes technical change has been discovered in some of Tesla's latest firmware builds, and it’s a good indicator of what’s coming next for Tesla. According to long-time Tesla hacker Greentheonly, Tesla has begun quietly preparing to update its Autopilot and FSD visualizations using a new engine.
While the feature is yet to be active, it’s already included in the firmware for the Model S and Model X vehicles with MCU 3 (AMD). Tesla is replacing the open-source Godot engine with Unreal Engine, one of the most popular and powerful engines in the video game industry.
With that said, let’s take a peek behind the curtains of what we can expect in a future update and which vehicles are expected to receive it.
Unreal is More Powerful and Capable
Tesla’s current FSD visualizations are built on the Godot Engine, a system well known for being lightweight, open-source, and efficient. That means it’s perfect to display the mostly simple, but functional vehicle models and objects we see in the visualization today.
The switch to Unreal Engine will likely lead to much more detailed visualizations for several reasons. While the Godot engine is a very capable engine, Unreal Engine is a world-class, high-fidelity graphics engine, famous for powering AAA video games using photorealistic environments. It does come at the cost of performance, but Tesla wouldn’t switch to Unreal unless they were planning major improvements to the vehicle’s visualizations and maps.
New Visuals in Action
The power of Unreal seems like it’ll extend beyond just Autopilot and FSD visualizations. The first hints of the new capabilities are already in the firmware, and Green was able to activate a new, more detailed vehicle model running on Unreal Engine in the video below.
This new model looks smoother and better lit than the current version. It’s not surprising that Tesla would start small and add the current models and objects to Unreal before focusing on new visualizations. When this feature launches, expect it to be a cleaner and smoother version of today’s visualizations, with more realistic lighting.
Ok, I am having a bit of trouble getting unreal engine to activate on the cluster, but it looks like on the main screen the car avatar is also controlled by it.
— green (@greentheonly) August 9, 2025
Now you can interact with it and it's getting somewhat more detailed.
See the example: pic.twitter.com/6lpXr6BK0K
Improved Visualizations
Back in 2022, Musk posted on Twitter at the time, that Tesla was planning to add 3D terrain to the vehicle’s visualizations. You can see the potential beginning of this in the Cybertruck visualizations that display 3D terrain when parked, but they don’t actually represent the surroundings.
Currently, there are a lot of objects that FSD and the vehicle recognize, but they are not displayed visually. The most common ones are speed bumps and traffic cones, but there are a large number of objects that aren’t displayed, although the vehicle knows what they are and how to deal with them. Tesla had slowly been improving the visuals, but the last improvement was more than a year ago, leading us to believe they’re already working on this new engine.
Rivian also uses the Unreal Engine for its visualizations. While Rivian prefers a more cartoonish look with its cel-shaded visualizations, Tesla has taken on a more realistic, but still simple, approach. While the Tesla vehicle is highly detailed in Tesla’s visualizations, other cars and objects are less detailed and featured in a simple white/gray tone, unless they need to grab the driver’s attention, at which point they become blue, red, or dark gray.
Tesla likely doesn’t want to visualize all data, but the pieces that may be important to the user, such as potholes, road debris, road signs, and more. In fact, there’s a whole list of potential objects that could be added to visualizations that would improve the experience, including guard rails, strollers, shopping carts, trailers, gates, more detailed crosswalks, and potentially other items such as trees or sidewalks.
In fact, Tesla has already said that they will soon display proper visualizations for trailers, and they may even start displaying Cybertrucks on the display. We suspect Tesla is working on adding these to Unreal.
3D Maps
Another intriguing possibility is the addition of 3D maps. Google Maps and Apple Maps have long provided 3D visuals that show trees and surrounding buildings in 3D. Since Tesla heavily relies on the Google API for its navigation data, such as traffic, map tiles, points of interest, and more, it could potentially be looking to add 3D objects to its navigation in a very similar way to Google Maps.
While 3D maps look fantastic, they also help the driver orient themselves better on the map as they can easily compare the on-screen visuals with those in real life.
Building Trust Through Realism
A key benefit of a major visualization graphics upgrade is its potential to build driver trust. Even as FSD has become massively more capable, the visualization still feels dated - whether you’re driving the space-ship like Cybertruck, or a refreshed Model Y.
That takes away from the overall driver experience - especially when we’ve been missing things like traffic cones and barricades in the visualization since the launch of FSD v12. Today, with v12.6.4 and v13.2.9, whether in MCU2 (Intel) or MCU3 (AMD), the display looks almost identical, even though the AMD infotainment unit is many times more capable. The few differences in the visual appearance are blur effects and the vehicle’s glass looking more transparent and realistic on AMD vehicles.
In today’s visualizations, we see vehicles and traffic around us, tracked to an astonishing degree of accuracy. But there are several issues with the visualization. Items flicker and stutter as they change sizes - things like trucks and trailers sometimes act odd, and obstacles on the road aren’t displayed. The visualizations play an important role in letting the driver know what the vehicle can see and understand. If the vehicle isn’t displaying traffic cones, many will assume that it didn’t see, and FSD may not act appropriately.
A powerful 3D engine could allow Tesla to render a much more faithful version of the surrounding environment right on the screen. Imagine seeing more accurate and detailed 3D models of the vehicles around you, rather than models that are stretched to fit the vehicle’s actual dimensions. Tesla has the potential to add different-sized vehicle models or create models that can be elongated properly so that limos and trucks can be displayed appropriately.
It looks like Tesla isn’t just going to add new models to the visualizations, but you’re re-thinking the whole experience.
While we don’t expect this sort of addition to the visuals, this AI-generated video gives us an interesting look at what is possible. We believe Tesla will keep the visuals as accurate as possible, so they won’t display objects that cannot be displayed accurately. They will also want to minimize distractions, so only expect objects to be displayed if they’re beneficial to the driver. Items such as barriers can be beneficial, but grass or detailed trucks may not be.
FSD with Unreal Engine UI? I can‘t wait. 🔥🔥🔥 @elonmusk 👀 pic.twitter.com/w7UunsBEhu
— Joseph 💎✌️🪑🇺🇸 Tesla Long Term Investor (@ShrimpTeslaLong) August 9, 2025
Hardware Requirement
One of the benefits of the Godot engine was that it was very lightweight. With this transition to Unreal Engine, Tesla will need a more powerful infotainment unit to power the visualizations, so expect it to only be available on AMD-based vehicles. Unfortunately, it sounds like Intel vehicles will be stuck with the visualizations they have today. While Tesla hasn’t talked about a newer MCU, MCU 3 is now more than four years old, so Tesla may also be considering a new infotainment unit in the future — hopefully one that’s easily upgradeable.
The new Unreal Engine binaries were found in firmware 2025.20 and newer, but only on the AMD-based Model S and Model X, which also include a discrete GPU. However, we don’t expect that to be a requirement for these visualizations.
Ultimately, it seems that the switch to Unreal Engine is a work in progress and something that Tesla is actively working on. It’s possible we could see it in the next UI overhaul or even this year’s holiday update.
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