I've often though about the common quip about games that "could run on a potato" and wondered what it would take to make games literally run on a potato.
The obvious answer is to power a gaming device with what is commonly referred to as a potato battery, but is more accurately described as an electrochemical potato cell.1
These cells are quite weak however. My interneting puts them at the 1 volt 1 mA range, which is about enough to power a small LED, so it will take more than one to power anything useful for games. Connecting a bunch of cells together would put out the watts we need, and allow us to call it a "potato battery" while still being technically correct.1
The question is how big does that battery need to be?
A Gameboy Color requires 2 AA batteries, each having a nominal voltage of 1.5v, that would last about 30 hours of game play. Assuming an alkaline battery has a capacity of 3.9 watt hours and are used in series, that means that it would draw about 40mA. With nothing but 1 v 1mA spuds, it would take a battery 3 deep by 40 wide to power a Gameboy color. Assuming an average potato is about 200 grams, that battery will weigh in at 24 kilos, or 53 pounds, and would roughly fit in the box your microwave came in (641 kb/m3)
But will it run Crysis?
The minimum requirements for Crysis are actually pretty low, but in the spirit of the question, I'll put together a generic high end gaming rig and see what it takes to run that. PCpartpicker says it will pull 466 W, but I'd want a safety factor at least as high as the power supply's rating, so I'll use 750 W.
North American wall outlets typically put out around 115 volts. This is an AC voltage, but I'm going to assume that we have a magic inverter and that all the RMS values and power factors and whatnot work out nicely because I only have an hour to hack this out during my lunch. By this hand wavey theorem, 750 W at 115 volts gives you 6.5 amps.
...which means a potato battery 115 deep by 6500 wide. 747500 spuds, 149500 kilos (328900 pounds) and 510 cubic meters. You could fit it in 13 common 20 foot shipping containers, and it would feed about 700 people for a year.
The important thing to note here is that, by estimating the power draw of the hardware required, and subsequently calculating the needed battery size, we can roughly quantify the computational intensity of a game in potatoes. I estimate Hawken at 300000 potatoes, or 0.3 megapotatoes
1The author acknowledges that these statements make him "that guy".
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