By John Walker on May 15th, 2008 at 11:14 am.
It’s Valve’s Hardware Survey time again, wouldyabelieveit, and RPS’ resident person who knows anything about hardware is currently in a bunker four hundred feet below the Earth’s surface, working on a project so top secret that even he isn’t aware what he’s doing. So, er, best of luck to me then.
Based on 1.7 million results, these figures are obviously a massive help to Valve, telling them exactly what tech their audience has. But they are likely poured over by every other developer, keen to get a perspective on where the average PC gamer lies, and a direction for which setups to pitch their games toward. LucasArts, can we suggest you take a look?
Intel still dominate the processors, but AMD aren’t too far behind. 58.5% to 41.5%, despite Intel’s head start with the multiple cores. Talking of which, over 59% of gamers are still working with just the one CPU, with 36.6% spreading the load across two. A lucky few, 4.3%, have a quad core, and a completely mysterious 107 people claim to have 3 CPUs. 227 players (0.02%) report 8 of the buggers, while one person reports 30. Then there are three people lying about having 127 CPUs inside their machines. Unless they are space travellers from the future.
NVidia continue to shit all over ATI, with over 62% of the graphics drivers run coming from the former. ATI only get a 31% share. The GeForce 8800 is on a remarkable 9.35% of people’s machines. (And apparently 71,425 people are still running DX7).
I’m slightly surprised by the lack of a big step forward for widescreen monitors. You’d be hard pressed to find a square TV for sale these days, but still 73.9% of Valve’s users are playing on a 4:3 screen. Only 25.7% have gone 16:9. (3.5% are running multiple desktops. Also in, 3.5% of users like to pretend they are a super-tech detective in an action movie).
Obviously Steam attracts a lot of microphone users, in order that they can loudly announce the sexuality of their opponents, and 64.5% of Valve’s audience say they have a mic. 23.4% say they don’t. Which leaves an extremely troubling 12.1% of gamers who don’t know if they have a microphone. Maybe it’s hiding!
But most surprising, Vista has shown a decrease in its share of users since November’s results. Six months ago it climbed from 7.99% to 16.91%. Microsoft must surely be expecting a significant increase by now, but rather the operating system was reported as being on only 14.95% of machines. No one wants your DX10, Microsoft!
15/05/2008 at 11:22 Matu says:
The 3-core processors should be AMD’s latest Phenoms, released in the end of April, so it should be pretty obvious that only a handful have them. I’m amazed that people actually buy AMDs these days, I just don’t see the point. Lovely that (hasta la) Vista has actually lost users.
15/05/2008 at 11:35 restricted3 says:
Oh, we want DX10, what we don’t want is Vista, thank you
15/05/2008 at 11:37 RLacey says:
Has Vista actually lost users, or is it just that so many more people with XP have signed up to Steam recently?
I suspect the latter. Although I would say that, given that I’m a perfectly happy Vista user.
15/05/2008 at 11:39 derFeef says:
@ Matu
The point? Hm.. price/performance ratio? Also AMD is more likeable then Intel in my eyes. But I should stop because I am and AMD/ATI fanboy ;)
I have to add: I just cant believe some facts. DX7? Low widescreen monitors numbers? People love oldscool :)
15/05/2008 at 11:44 Matu says:
Well, yes, I think that Intel’s price/performance ratio is better. But it might be just me. I was something of an AMD fanboy myself a few years ago, until Intel swept the floor with AMD when they released C2D.
15/05/2008 at 11:45 Optimaximal says:
So having relatively overpriced, underspecced, heat generating wastes of PCB makes you likeable? So why didn’t anyone like Intel’s Prescott?
15/05/2008 at 11:47 phuzz says:
Well, I’m still gaming on a 4:3 display, until today becuase my new shiney 22″ widescreen has just turned up (£170 from dell).
Ok, I just wanted to boast about my new screen really, sorry :(
I am wondering if I’ll have to turn off much eye candy to get the same frame rates moving from 1280×1024 to 1600×1050…
Edit: also quite impressed to see that at least 3% of the Intel CPUs are presumably overclocked
15/05/2008 at 11:49 Pidesco says:
I have a nice 17″ 4:3 CRT screen, and I’m not getting rid of it until it breaks.
CRTs are really the only way to go for gamers on a budget, and it sucks that they are disappearing.
@phuzz: Unless you have a really expensive system, you bet you will have to turn off the eye candy. Haha. :D
15/05/2008 at 11:56 John Walker says:
It’s doubtful that Vista’s figures have dropped, but rather XP’s figures have climbed faster. It’s probably more indicative of Steam’s growth than Vista’s failure, but it certainly demonstrates that people are not upgrading, which must be an issue for MS. Annoyingly, it no longer appears to be possible to access previous surveys to get the figures.
Also, hooray for Phuzz’s new monitor!
15/05/2008 at 11:57 MeestaNob! says:
You can get DIRT cheap 22″ widescreens that are respectable for $200-$250 AUD, isn’t that about 140 pounds?
15/05/2008 at 11:58 Colthor says:
They did seperate out x86 and x64 flavours of Vista this survey; the total is 17.6%. Did they in the previous one? If not that would explain the “drop”.
15/05/2008 at 12:01 Muzman says:
The day that they make an LCD or other widescreen that is a) up to my colour standards and b) that I can afford…is some ways off (and when it gets here it’ll be something besides an LCD I suspect).
Likewise, I would have thought the figure would be higher as well. Everyone and his dog that I know has got some dell package or similar and they’re pretty cheap and pretty decent (a lot better than package deals used to be) and all come with some stripe of widescreen LCD. They’re not gamers though. Maybe gamers spend their money on speed upgrades first.
15/05/2008 at 12:06 Pidesco says:
@MeestaNob!: But that doesn’t include the cost of having a system that can keep up with a 22″ monitor’s fixed resolution.
15/05/2008 at 12:06 DosFreak says:
But they are likely poured over by every other developer, keen to get a perspective on where the average PC gamer using STEAM lies, and a direction for which setups to pitch their games toward.
Fixed that for ya.
15/05/2008 at 12:09 MeestaNob! says:
True, but a 3850HD etc is only about $150 as well, then you’re laughing* (erm, 80 pounds? I’m not sure).
*Unless your CPU is ancient.
EDIT: Gah my HTML makes baby jesus cry.
15/05/2008 at 12:13 Alex Hopkinson says:
MeestaNob!: £140 is still £140 too much if you have a perfectly operational, good quality 4:3 LCD you paid £140ish for 3 or 4 years ago.
Plus there’s the hassle of getting a whole new batch of wallpapers for Windows! :)
15/05/2008 at 12:13 James G says:
Okay, ‘fess up, who has the 30 core system?
Edit: And 3 people with 127?
15/05/2008 at 12:16 Kareem says:
I’m not a fanboy of any particular corporate hardware manufacturer. I had AMD and ATI hardware for a long time when I felt the price to performance ratio of the processors and the late 9000 series of cards was great.
Now that Intel has a better price-performance ratio and NVIDIA is blowing ATI out of the water I’ve got an Intel/NVIDIA setup.
15/05/2008 at 12:25 The_B says:
Part of me is dissapointed that you didn’t go for the obvious “Results May Vary” pun in the title. :(
15/05/2008 at 12:26 Pidesco says:
That’s still a lot of money for someone on a budget, and furthermore, it doesn’t take in consideration that with an LCD you’re essentially stuck with the native resolution, thus pushing you to upgrade your system a lot sooner than you would with a CRT.
15/05/2008 at 12:31 Alec Meer says:
I find hardware fanboyism absolutely fascinating – it’s amazing how some people feel this football team-esque personal attachment to a giant monolithic corporation, and can assign personalities to them – Intel this greedy monster, AMD the plucky underdog fighting for the good of the people… I mean, either one would construct a processor from the bones of human babies if they thought it would turn a profit.
I can understand why people get that way about Mac products or certain brands of phone or whatever, because that’s based on personal preference of interface and features, but a processor or 3D card isn’t something you interact with in a meaningful way. It’s just in there being fast enough or not fast enough.
I guess it’s the case that either a bad experience with one company’s product or the need to justify spending so much money on a single item convinces folk to pick a side and stick to it.
15/05/2008 at 12:38 Tommyboy says:
Take that you fanboys.
15/05/2008 at 12:43 Alex says:
It’s still silly. Same happens with Nintendo fanboys – they really have us, the gamer, at heart.. etc.
Apple, Nintendo, any of them – they’re all corporations trying to make money and as much of it as possible. I think it’s healthy to have no illusions about that.
We all try to eek some sense of identity out of which products we choose, I guess, some more than others.
15/05/2008 at 12:44 Sam says:
Ah, Alec, but it’s about the stated policies of the companies as well – for example, ATi have been dogged by issues with sub-standard drivers (and still are, certainly in Linux), and have historically been worse at “engaging” with their community than nVidia. If there’s anything that builds loyalty, it’s appearing to care about your customers, you know.
Similarly, there’s a tendency to “stick it to the man”, and AMD are conveniently in a position to be a proxy for this, versus Intel. Not that this is succeeding very well, at the moment – but then, if they did, presumably they’d lose some of their support as they became more like Intel…
15/05/2008 at 12:47 Dinger says:
Well, maybe it’s Steam’s recent releases that attract different segments of the PC population. Sure, something like the Orange Box will be picked up by a considerable number of people who hadn’t logged on to Steam (I mean, when I bought TOB, my old account was two PCs old, and probably not working), and the OB buyers will include a lot of top-end new machine owners. But what’s the overall impact of Audiosurf? Could it appeal to a broader demographic? How many people signed on to Steam just to play a $10 music game?
15/05/2008 at 12:50 sluzzuls says:
“it’s amazing how some people feel this football team-esque personal attachment to..” i was thinking this about religion the other day. wars equaling fan riots and all that. anyway.
i think its amazing that 1024 and 1280 are the resolution standards. i havent had something that low since the turn of the century and i could never ever survive that way now.
15/05/2008 at 12:52 Paul Moloney says:
I’m an old skool CRT user too (21″, I think) and won’t upgrade until I absolutely have to, and hopefully by then LCD monitors will have at least some of the remaining issues sorted out, including their poor color rendering. Possibly I’m just been exposed to poor monitoring, but the one I’m looking at displays colors as a different shade even if I change my angle of viewing by a few percent.
P.
15/05/2008 at 13:02 Pete says:
That’s pored over John. Unless we’re talking about that very special Valve sauce. Mmmmmm, Valve sauce.
15/05/2008 at 13:07 Rob says:
I’m using a CRT too, but that’s just because I can’t justify buying a new one when this one still works so well.
15/05/2008 at 13:14 Lightbulb says:
Paul Moloney – They have ‘fixed’ that problem. The problem is not that its that the cheapest (of 3) types of LCD is the most popular. You can get a perfect 24+” widescreen LCD but you are looking at between £450 to £1000. When my CRT cost me 20 quid and performs as well i’m not seeing the point.
—
I’d also like to point out that the processor speed survey is utterly useless. Woo 22% running at 2Hz. Its that a 2hz q6600 or a 1999 celeron?
15/05/2008 at 13:17 Nimic says:
Hmm… I have AMD and Nvidia, is that a bad idea? Just seems like everyone is either AMD/ATI or Intel/Nvidia :x
Oh, and 17 inch monitor ftw!
It’s strange (maybe not), but even though I upgrade my computer relatively often these days, getting a new monitor hasn’t even crossed my mind so far. Either way I’m not going to spend a small fortune on a monitor, so unless I can get a cheap, reliable LCD (with no big problems) I’m going to stick with my old one as long as I can.
15/05/2008 at 13:26 Rook says:
You can get new Dell 2407s with 3year warrenties and no dead/stuck pixels off of ebay for £350.
It’s TN+film (super cheap) that have that horrible colour shifting, but everyone is suckered into the pixel response time of them (2-6ms) and cheap price. Despite the fact that they’ll never notice the response time compared to monitor lag and they’ll always notice the shitty colour/viewing angles.
15/05/2008 at 13:32 nakke says:
Weird to see so few with quad core, imo. Q6600 has been reasonably cheap for quite some time. I guess more gamers are opting for the performs-better-in-games-currently-since-very-few-support-quad alternative, the E8400, then?
15/05/2008 at 13:35 meatpeople says:
About the hardware fanboyism, well I think it’s to a large extent about the loyalty the companies deserve. I use Linux for everything but gaming so support is important. NVidia were generally far superior to ATI for supporting Linux so I bought them. Now AMD have bought ATI and are open sourcing driver development. If it pans out my next GFX card purchase might well be ATI (AMD).
About the Vista usage drop figure – do track changes in hardware config? Wouldn’t be hard given that it’s account based. It’d be interesting to see if it were more XP sales or people switching from Vista back to XP.
15/05/2008 at 13:42 MeestaNob! says:
Uneducated comment, please correct if need be:
I imagine the cost of living in UK/Europe is a big factor in the argument from your side. my understanding is that’s its fairly dear to live there so perhaps there isn’t the money for computer upgrades and other non-essentials?
To me hardware is ludicrously cheap for bang/buck junkies. Current $150 (80P) equivalent tech used to be $600 (250P) not 18 months ago.
Here in Aus we complain about how dear stuff still is, but it seems to be more ‘affordable’ in general for our population despite this.
I have no facts, just basing on what I’m hearing here.
15/05/2008 at 13:54 Valentin Galea says:
You know what always surprised (and saddened) me at these surveys?
802,295 people – 64.93 % – are running with 60Hz screen refresh rate! 60hz is one way ticket to eye problems land!
15/05/2008 at 14:08 derFeef says:
@ Valentin Galea
Thats std. for LCD screens, so maybe thats why the numbers are that high :)
15/05/2008 at 14:09 Kitt Basch says:
Wow, there are 166 people using 6″ monitors.
Are they playing Peggle on digital photo frames?
15/05/2008 at 14:12 Sam says:
Dunno – it can’t even be Asus Eee PCs, because they have 7″ displays…
In fact, I bet that’s what the 567 people with widescreen 7″ displays are using.
15/05/2008 at 14:15 Lukasz says:
equipment cost in australia isn’t bad. especially if you buy from small neighborhood shops and internet.
but games are horribly expensive. New games 100 dollars, sometimes even more (88 American dollars for CoD4)
anyhow
Nobody wants to see AMD and ATI go bankrupt. who would replace them? no competition = shitty products.
So people support them.
15/05/2008 at 14:23 Dean says:
I’m using two 17″ LCDs, so any move to widescreen would be backwards in terms of screen space, plus it gives me extra desktop space without having to massively upgrade the PC to run games at full res. I really do find it the best of both worlds.
15/05/2008 at 14:29 Yhancik says:
I’m always a little surprised (although it’s getting expectable) by some people’s reactions when such results are published.
“OMG some people are still using *that 3 years old technology* when you can get a *3 months old technology* for only xxx€/$/£”.
Sure it’s probably better to play at maximum details on a 22″ screen on a 7.1 audio system.
Does it make the experience on a modest computer on a CRT screen with stereo speakers that terrible, unbearable, miserable ? Am I missing much ? I don’t think so.
I’ve played some games both on low-end and mid-high systems in the last years, and I can’t really tell that the pleasure of a better technical quality ever increased my enjoyment enough to justify any investment.
And even if I can’t play some newest games (because of pixel shaders compatibility), it’s not a big deal. I haven’t finished Stalker. I haven’t finished Mafia. I haven’t finished Fahrenheit. Hell, I still have to finish Outcast :p
I can see the point of upgrading, I’m not an amish :p But a part of the gamers population seems to give more importance technical excellence and always-getting-the-latest-stuff. Good for them, and their money is certainly helping the gaming industry. But then it’s not surprising that we hear stuff like “PC gaming is expensive”, which, in the end, isn’t really good for videogames as a creative medium.
15/05/2008 at 15:07 caesarbear says:
Just how meaningful is this relationship you have with your iPod?
If you’re not the kind of person to think about nuts and bolts, then of course you wouldn’t look past the shiny exterior of a gadget. Yet for those who like to be familiar with the inner workings of their PC, they’ll see it as a collection of specific parts. Why then wouldn’t the same irrational loyalty of brand names transfer to those specific parts?
Plus, if ground up baby bones make my system faster, cooler, better, cheaper, I’m all for it.
15/05/2008 at 15:32 Lightbulb says:
Well blood is supposed to be a better conductor of heat than water and we have water cooling already…
15/05/2008 at 15:36 wcaypahwat says:
Im running a 17″ samsung lcd. I have limited living space to deal with, so anything bigger just isn’t viable. Hell, my keyboard barely fits on my desk.
And yeah, friendly neighbourhood stores are much better. Got a dvd drive the other day for $30, where all the bigger stores sell the same model for $99.
15/05/2008 at 15:40 ggregg says:
LCDs are a big fat lie, at least for gamers. Fixed resolution is a definite no-go. Plus, I have yet to see colors better than I get on my pro – quality 21” trinitron which I got on sale for E100 three years ago.
15/05/2008 at 15:54 nakke says:
ggregg: the only problem is that really, nobody makes or sells CRTs these days. Yes, obviously you can buy used, but that’s not really a viable option for big tournaments or big gaming cafés.
OLED ought to fix the crappy colors and response time issues, though. Might be 5 years until OLED screens are cheaper, but they’re coming..
15/05/2008 at 16:01 brog says:
lol @ crts. big fat ass monitors!
15/05/2008 at 16:01 itsallcrap says:
Trying to internally justify the amount of money they paid for them, you mean?
*ducks*
15/05/2008 at 16:06 spd from Russia says:
PC gaming is dying haha
if this is really representative, no wonder modern PC game dont sell that well – only minority (like ~25%) can run them
15/05/2008 at 16:07 Colthor says:
LCDs actually scale below-native resolutions really well these days (for really low-res stuff like 640×480 they’re better than CRTs because they don’t look so blocky due to the filtering). The “they only work at their native resolution!” statement really is daft.
I was amazed when I replaced my aging Iiyama VMPro450 with a 20″ 1600×1200 panel at the improvement in image clarity and quality; I’d been really wary about getting a TFT.
15/05/2008 at 16:46 Birdoman says:
@Lightbulb: clotting would be a problem. You’d have to steal the blood off someone with hemophilia…
15/05/2008 at 17:09 Smee says:
Oh, there’s anti-coagulating chemicals you can add to blood for the desired smooth flow. EDTA, Citrate and Oxalate according to Wikipedia. Well, it’d certainly be a niche casemod.
Hmm, all this talk reminds me of that recent Boing Boing article about the guy who makes cameras out of human skulls, HIV positive blood (for a red filter) and an aborted fetus as decoration. Sometimes I do wonder about the merits of art.
15/05/2008 at 17:15 James G says:
I’ve got two LCD screens, a 17” 4:3 and a 19” Widescreen. The 4:3 is actually my primary display as the widescreen is an HD television and is often used for watchging TV while I work. (I’d love a keyboard shortcut to switch displays, but can’t find any way to do it.) If I had CRTs of similar size they’d take up half my desk.
15/05/2008 at 17:18 Saflo says:
(And apparently 71,425 people are still running DX7)
My card is six years old and only DX7-compatible. Go banana!
15/05/2008 at 17:37 endorphine says:
I want DX10… Fuck Vista…
15/05/2008 at 17:46 Evan says:
“I’m slightly surprised by the lack of a big step forward for widescreen monitors. You’d be hard pressed to find a square TV for sale these days, but still 73.9% of Valve’s users are playing on a 4:3 screen. Only 25.7% have gone 16:9. (3.5% are running multiple desktops. Also in, 3.5% of users like to pretend they are a super-tech detective in an action movie).”
Because gamers are smart enough to know that you get more monitor from a 20inch 4:3 than you do from a 20inch 16:9. There’s more area there.
When you realize that widescreen monitors have less viewable area than 4:3, you realize why manufacturers are pushing them.
15/05/2008 at 17:54 Max says:
Evan
Despite being right about the fact that 4:3 monitors have a larger viewable area than equivalent 16:9 panels, everything looks better in widescreen.
Assuming you can get the game to display in widescreen resolution of course; older games like Turok (just a random example) look guff.
I should point out though, that most computer monitors (not TVs) are in fact 16:10, not 16:9.
15/05/2008 at 17:58 sinister agent says:
Has Vista actually lost users, or is it just that so many more people with XP have signed up to Steam recently?
I can believe it’s a bit of both. The only computer shop on my town (and they know their stuff) recommends not bothering with vista, and the staff are often asked to remove it form people’s machines. It just causes too many problems at present, and that’s before you even consider games.
That’ll probably change in time, but I’m not surprised the number’s gone down in the meantime.
As for the results at large, I’m frankly somewhat reassured. Even considering that their sample would probably be a little biased towards people who spent stupid amounts of money on their e-penis, most people seem to show some sense and simply play on effective, but not pointlessly powerful spec machines.
I’m also very surprised to learn that my processor is apparently relatively high-end after all. Not bad considering I got the whole machine and delivery for £100.
Refurbish, my friends! Therein lies the bargain.
Of course, the downside to everyone apparently being more sensible than I thought is that most developers will probably not realise the significance of this, and continue to push overly demanding games in order to impress the very vocal minority who are only impressed by technical wankery, at the cost of everyone else, their own profits and, ultimately, pc gamers as a whole.
15/05/2008 at 18:06 Pod says:
I still run a 1.5GHz with only 512Mb of RAM and some Geforce 7 doodoo or other. Do you all rabidally hate me now? Well I don’t care, it runs World in Conflict dandily.
Yes, WIC runs in mega-low graphics mode – but a dead enemy tank is a dead enemy tank, whether if it’s made up of 50,000 polygons or 5. I also don’t see the point on playing in a resolution over 1280*. “But the already small pixels are now even smaller!” you cry. “So what?” I say! “Edges stopped becoming blurred messed around 800×600….”.
*obviously my £50 wonder of a machine can’t really RUN modern games in those resolutions, but like I care? I can shoot just as many men in TF2 as you rich ladies can.
15/05/2008 at 18:20 Max says:
@Pod
I thought WiC required shaders and therefore Direct X 8…?
15/05/2008 at 19:02 Theory says:
The current version of the survey began in November of last year (it says so at the top of the page). Valve would have announced if it had actually been reset.
The upshot of which is we can’t gauge how many people have Vista, because the bulk of the data we’re looking at was gathered before it came onto the market.
15/05/2008 at 19:03 Max says:
Ah shit, just realised you said “Geforce 7″ and not “DirectX 7″
>.<
15/05/2008 at 19:44 majorbromly says:
Wait…127 core processor? WTF?
15/05/2008 at 19:50 Max says:
Maybe 18 PlayStation 3s linked together and running Windows?
Maybe?
=P
15/05/2008 at 20:33 Kadayi says:
Although I’m running with an Nvidia card atm, I do vividly recall being pretty unimpressed with the fast turnaround shenanigans Nvidia pulled back in the day with the Geforce 3 cards, which were pretty much redundant barely a year after they were released.
15/05/2008 at 20:34 majorbromly says:
Very plausible :)
15/05/2008 at 20:56 RichPowers says:
Valve surveys are pretty awesome, let me say. I wish the folks with ridiculous numbers of processors or tiny monitors would come forward an explain what’s going on (I refuse to ascribe these anomalies to reporting errors; that’s no fun!)
My new rig has a dual core AMD processor mainly because I like crappy performance. Actually I’ve used Intel for years and years and wanted to try something else for a change.
15/05/2008 at 21:01 Mike says:
Obviously, 128 processors would cause some kind of overflow.
15/05/2008 at 21:46 Pod says:
Maxamillion@
I used to have a Radeodoeon 7500 something or doodoo, which I believe is a DX7 thingy? Anyway, I bought the geforce 7600 GS for about £40 just so I could play Portal and TF2. It had the added benefit of making lots of my other games run a bit better. Woo!
edit: Also, perhaps some big server-farm filled out the survey? One of their massive Primepower 2000 obviously runs TF2.
15/05/2008 at 22:23 majorbromly says:
@Pod
I bought the 7600 too, surprised what it does in my old AGP system.
15/05/2008 at 22:35 Dave says:
I just went from a 19″ CRT to a 21.6″ widescreen LCD yesterday.
My sad little GeForce 7300 could *NOT* handle TF2 at 1680×1050 resolution — but then, it didn’t do that well at 1024×768 with options turned off, either.
A 9600GT has changed all that, and now I’m running smoothly at 1680×1050 with most of the options cranked up.
As a bonus, I never knew Hellgate’s textures didn’t completely suck. But apparently, they don’t.
I do wish good ol’ Crimsonland supported 1680×1050 though.
15/05/2008 at 22:53 Razor says:
@ John Walker:
Use archive.org to access some of the older surveys. It would be nice if valve set this up for everyone to see the old ones.
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html
16/05/2008 at 00:07 Poet says:
Um what happened to creative sound cards?!
As for the lower Vista numbers I for one have tried to use it on at least 4 different occasions and finally just went back to good old XP, MAJOR trouble getting my Audigy 2 working with more then 2 of my speakers. Also it just annoyed the hell out of me, popups and warnings all the fracking time.
16/05/2008 at 00:16 sinister agent says:
I didn’t think people generally even bothered with soundcards anymore. The days when PCs came with nothing but a primitive beeping are long gone. Onboard sound is all that most people really need.
16/05/2008 at 00:26 Alec Meer says:
I’m enormously fond of my X-Fi, but that’s mostly because it’s good at polishing up MP3s.
16/05/2008 at 00:38 Pidesco says:
I think the proble with sound cards is that onboard sound really had a leap in quality in the past few years, and there aren’t any proper new titles that actually benefit from having a posh sound card.
When I got my old SBLive card, it was mostly to enjoy the positional goodness in Thief and System Shock 2. Now that that card has croaked, there haven’t been any titles pushing me to buy a Creative card. I almost got an X-Fi for Bioshock, but the positional audio in that was complete crap, and the gameplay didn’t really benefit from that.
16/05/2008 at 01:16 mrrobsa says:
@Valentin Galea:
Exsqueeze me? Care to elaborate?
16/05/2008 at 09:03 CitizenErazed says:
The fact that so few people use proper soundcards depress me. A 50 quid creative card will blow any kind of onboard chip out of the water. I often find it amazing that people will spend upwards of five or six hundred quid on a PC, widescreen monitors (coming to that), all the rest of it, then use the onboard sound with a cheap pair of speakers. I use an Audigy 2 connected to a proper hi-fi amplifier, and it sounds absolutely incredible.
The monitor debate will rage until the end of time. I’ve just replaced one of my two 17″ TFT monitors with a 19″ widescreen TFT monitor, and I will never go back to CRT. All those problems with degaussing, static, and not to mention the power usage of a CRT is ridiculous compared to a TFT.
EDIT: Oh, and someone mentioned why aren’t people using quad core processors. For me it was because the E8*** range are brand-new, and look very shiny. That plus they run cooler. I’ll replace it with a quad-core jobby next year when intel’s purpose-built quad core processors have come into the market and settled down properly.
16/05/2008 at 09:16 John P (Katsumoto) says:
I’m just not an audio-buff. I’ve had a proper soundcard in the past and I honestly just couldn’t tell the difference. I hold my hands up and admit this is me having shit ears rather than there being no difference, but i’m very happy with my USB speakers! I CAN hear surround sound, however, so I have a nice pair of (USB!) 5.1 headphones for that. I’m actually forced to use USB speakers/headphones because the soundcard that came with my current PC didn’t work. They did actually send me a replacement but I CBA to install it as these USB ones do the trick fine!
I also never understood why CRT was in any way better than TFT, but then this is probably my eyes being shit and not noticing the finer use of colour, or something!
16/05/2008 at 09:25 Muzman says:
I went from a Turtle Beach Monterey to a Yamaha for the longest time. When that died and I upgraded to a board with a Realtek HD thing on it and, to my surprise, I haven’t seen/heard any reason to get an extra card at all (haven’t bothered mucking around with midi in a while). It’s thoroughly decent.
Some better compatability with fancy games hardware rendering might be nice, but that area seems a bit of a mess right now, so it seems better to wait until the various standards get more settled and stable.
16/05/2008 at 09:35 Butler` says:
LCD/TFT technology has been on par or better than CRT for some years. It’s just a few select elitist-types (the kind that actively use Linux on their gaming machines just to make a point…) carrying on the suspicion.
In other news, SEDs are around the corner, do not fear.
16/05/2008 at 16:19 Crispy says:
Vista is on the decrease since it’s now possible to (completely illegally; invalidates your copy of XP but there are getarounds) hack WindowsXP to run DX10. There was absolutely nothing about XP that made it unsuitable for DX10, it was just MS being greedy/unconfident gits about Vista and trying to lock DX10 to it. That and there’s barely any games out there that give a good reason to move to DX10.
Before anyone jumps to conclusions, no I don’t support software piracy, nor do I support MS’s aggressive pull-no-punches business methodology. I just think perhaps the fact DX10 is now unlocked on XP might have something to do with it.
16/05/2008 at 16:42 caesarbear says:
Perhaps it’s elitist, but it’s certainly not suspicion. The typical problem is that you can’t and haven’t been able to buy or even look at a high performance CRT in a retail store for ages. You have to take the risk of ordering them, but it’s a huge difference in terms of image quality.
It’s not like CRT advocates are anti-progress or something. I personally would love it if some of the new technology hurries up and gets here. I just see LCD as a compromise, rather than an improvement. If you don’t mind the compromise, that’s fine, but don’t try to suggest CRT elitists are lying.
17/05/2008 at 09:06 Morte says:
spd from Russia says:
“PC gaming is dying haha
if this is really representative, no wonder modern PC game dont sell that well – only minority (like ~25%) can run them”
Some gaming journalist should cross reference this with all the Brad Wardell quotes about making games designed first and foremost to sell, that will run on most hardware etc, rather than games designed to impress.
17/05/2008 at 10:14 a1ex says:
Sadly they dont give an extra figure for the default wine display driver name so you can’t see exactly how many out there use steam in linux. I remember reading of about 4% last time, wich would indicate there could be some kind of rise, looking at the “Other” graph in “Video Card Driver Name”
20/05/2008 at 01:02 Scandalon says:
I just wish it would take into account multiple machines under one account – for instance, there’s my main gaming rig, my one at work (crap vid card, but on a fat pipe, so if I want to play TF2…) or my work laptop, or my wife’s laptop…
21/05/2008 at 05:29 Maltose says:
I’m surprised so few people have three cores. AMD released 3-core CPUs a while ago. I guess they aren’t very popular.