Following Putin’s order in the spring of 2024 to develop a Russian gaming console, the country’s industry decided to pursue two approaches. According to the Habr website, one option is to design an independent console equipped with a Russian-made dual-core processor called Elbrus, while the other path appears to involve creating a cloud gaming service.
Russia is developing a gaming console based on its Elbrus processor that features a Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) microarchitecture originally aimed at heavy-duty, mission-critical workloads. On the performance side of things, Elbrus has nothing to write home about based on benchmarks that have largely found it “completely unacceptable” for most tasks.
Speaking of cloud gaming, Russian gamers might be interested in a game console developed by MTS, a prominent Russian telecommunications company. MTS makes no secret that its console is a cloud-based gaming service, though the company calls it the MTS Fog Play platform.
The device uses low-end hardware, comes with an Xbox-like controller, and costs around $50. Since, for $50, you cannot make a console capable of rendering even entry-level Android games, the device will rely on MTS’s Fog Play cloud service. That service will support both remote gaming and rental gaming principles (i.e., owners of higher-end PCs interested in MTS’s games can rent games and still rely on hardware they own).
Neither of these consoles has come to market yet, but we’ll keep a close eye out for benchmarks when they do.
