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!
See all the rest of the figures here.
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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.
@Lightbulb: clotting would be a problem. You’d have to steal the blood off someone with hemophilia…
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.
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.
(And apparently 71,425 people are still running DX7)
My card is six years old and only DX7-compatible. Go banana!
I want DX10… Fuck Vista…
“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.
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.
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.
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.
@Pod
I thought WiC required shaders and therefore Direct X 8…?
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.
Ah shit, just realised you said “Geforce 7″ and not “DirectX 7″
>.<
Wait…127 core processor? WTF?
Maybe 18 PlayStation 3s linked together and running Windows?
Maybe?
=P
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.
Very plausible :)
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.
Obviously, 128 processors would cause some kind of overflow.
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.
@Pod
I bought the 7600 too, surprised what it does in my old AGP system.
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.
@ 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
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.
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.
I’m enormously fond of my X-Fi, but that’s mostly because it’s good at polishing up MP3s.
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.
@Valentin Galea:
Exsqueeze me? Care to elaborate?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”
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…
I’m surprised so few people have three cores. AMD released 3-core CPUs a while ago. I guess they aren’t very popular.