The 2025 Holiday Update of Tesla (2025.44.25.1) is already sending waves to the community with excitement. The driving visualization with the Unreal Engine is finally being delivered to owners of 2021 and new Model S and Model X, a significant advancement in graphics quality, responsiveness, and overall immersion. This update aligns Tesla’s flagship models with the Model 3 and Model Y updates, which ran visualizations based on Unreal Engine since the end of 2023.
The main focus of the new experience is the total redesign of the way in which the car makes your world appear, the doors, the lights, the effects, the environment, and even minor details such as reflections. The outcome is a fluid game-engine-level display that is alive, polished, and dramatically more modern. It becomes obvious as soon as the screen is lit up with the new interface that Tesla has taken the limit of what visual systems in a car can provide.
A Leap in Visual Fidelity
The shift to Unreal Engine opens up the amount of detail that could not be achieved in the legacy rendering pipeline of Tesla. The cars and the environment now have more realistic shadows, curvier lines, and extremely smooth movements with a much faster frame rate. Door effects, such as those displayed when one interacts with the car in the Controls screen, now open and close in a natural effect, with lighting and depth that resemble an average video game.
Loving the unreal fidelity and smoothness. Makes this "old" HW3(ryzen) feel new and relevant again! 👍🏾 pic.twitter.com/O4Bo2iePI7
— Black Tesla (@blktsla) December 10, 2025
The 3d car model of the Model S/X is more realistic. The signs, brakes, and headlights shine with a faint glow. The whole scene is very dynamic with your interaction with the settings of the vehicle. It is a sight to behold, particularly on the high-resolution, large screens of the high-end S/X models.
Performance Improvements You Can Feel
In addition to the graphical boost that is apparent, the Unreal Engine system provides significant performance improvements. Changing the menus is more immediate. Driving visualization remains unproblematic even with a processor running FSD Beta, navigation, and multimedia at the same time. The years of refining in-house hardware have been spent, and the combination of it and a game engine of professional quality finally opens the opportunities.
The update rollout has reportedly introduced:
- Increased frame rate in complicated scenes (traffic, intersections, full visualization).
- Fewer input latencies, which makes touch handling more natural.
- Smaller resource utilization, which is smooth even with a heavy compute load.
Improved Environmental Consciousness
The move by Tesla to Unreal Engine is one of the most exciting and the greater the visualization becomes informative. All the cars around have more distinct outlines and slicker movements. There is increased clarity in indicators, brake lights, and movement intentions.
Even minor details, such as road edges, sidewalk lines, foot traffic visualization, etc., are more vivid and more realistic. It not only looks good, but also enhances driver confidence by creating a more natural interface into the visibility of what the car senses and how neural networks are feeling.
Conclusion
The Holiday Update is a game-changing upgrade to the already stunning 2021+ Model S and Model X and is powered by Unreal Engine. The graphics are less jagged, the interface is more detailed, and the overall driving graphics are far more modern and engulfing. It is one of the most visually impressive updates from Tesla in a long time and an exciting glimpse of what future UI innovations can potentially appear like.
