Last April, Vladimir Putin demanded that his government create a Russian video game ecosystem. The country is in fact deprived of consoles from American and Japanese manufacturers, at least officially (the gray market remains prolific), and online stores are no longer accessible. The solution, from the Kremlin's point of view, is therefore to develop a Russian video game industry, almost ex nihilo (there are game development studios).
However, there is a long way to go, especially when it comes to hardware. There are currently two main initiatives that have been put in place. The first and probably the most advanced comes from the operator MTS, which is developing a cloud gaming platform, Fog Play, as well as a box accompanied by an Xbox-type controller.
This solution, billed at around fifty dollars, should support streaming games from remote servers (such as Xbox Cloud Gaming or GeForce Now) as well as local streaming, i.e. from the home PC.
The other initiative is to design a "real" console with local technologies. And that still seems quite unrealistic. The device is said to be based on the Elbrus processor, which is “not yet advanced enough to compete with the PS5 and Xbox,” according to Anton Gorelkin, deputy chairman of the Duma Committee on Information Policy, who gave an update on his Telegram account taken over by Habr.
This processor, originally designed for industrial and military applications, is based on the VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) architecture. The performance of this specialized processor is not at all comparable to that of modern consoles in terms of raw power. Moreover, video games require specific hardware optimizations, not to mention a GPU that holds up.
Despite everything, this famous processor has very broad shoulders: the sovereign console is not designed "to simply carry a hundred old games". The platform must "serve to promote and popularize national video game products and to broaden their audience beyond PC and mobile games"! A sacred mission that seems absolutely impossible to accomplish with solely Russian technologies, at least not without massive investments.
In these conditions, how to meet Putin's demand? Fingers crossed, perhaps: "I hope that our colleagues will take this task with the utmost seriousness and propose something truly revolutionary (...) the solution will have to be unconventional", explains Anton Gorelkin. It is far from being won.
Source: Tom's Hardware
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