Comments on: Valve Hardware Survey: May Results

By: Maltose

Maltose — Wed, 21 May 2008 04:29:17 +0000

I’m surprised so few people have three cores. AMD released 3-core CPUs a while ago. I guess they aren’t very popular.

By: Scandalon

Scandalon — Tue, 20 May 2008 00:02:17 +0000

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…

By: a1ex

a1ex — Sat, 17 May 2008 09:14:04 +0000

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”

By: Morte

Morte — Sat, 17 May 2008 08:06:59 +0000

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.

By: caesarbear

caesarbear — Fri, 16 May 2008 15:42:41 +0000

It’s just a few select elitist-types… carrying on the suspicion.

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.

By: Crispy

Crispy — Fri, 16 May 2008 15:19:42 +0000

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.

By: Butler`

Butler` — Fri, 16 May 2008 08:35:21 +0000

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.

By: Muzman

Muzman — Fri, 16 May 2008 08:25:15 +0000

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.

By: John P (Katsumoto)

John P (Katsumoto) — Fri, 16 May 2008 08:16:51 +0000

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!

By: CitizenErazed

CitizenErazed — Fri, 16 May 2008 08:03:44 +0000

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.

By: mrrobsa

mrrobsa — Fri, 16 May 2008 00:16:06 +0000

@Valentin Galea:

Exsqueeze me? Care to elaborate?

By: Pidesco

Pidesco — Thu, 15 May 2008 23:38:29 +0000

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.