With just 1 W of energy, you can play Tomb Raider – the project launches on a microcontroller and costs $25

One enthusiast ran the first Tomb Raider on a tiny ESP32-P4 board, which cost less than $25 and consumed about 1W of power even under load. The game runs through the open OpenLara engine, and images are displayed on the screen at a resolution of 1024×600 pixels. But there is no video card inside the board – everything is handled by the microcontroller.

The device is based on the ESP32-P4 and has two 32-bit RISC-V cores running at 400 MHz. There’s also 768 KB of SRAM, up to 64 MB of PSRAM, FPU, DSP and pixel processing accelerators. That sounds tame even by budget smartphone standards, but it’s enough to run classic Tomb Raider.

The developers used OpenLara, an open source project to port the original game engine to modern hardware. In the demo, the game was programmatically rendered at 320×240 resolution and then upscaled to 1024×600 using the built-in PPA accelerator. Connected to the board is a small LCD display, a USB keyboard, and an ES8311 audio codec for stereo. The result is a full-fledged gaming system that truly fits in the palm of your hand and uses less power than many modern routers.

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