Measure Yourself

Do you own a DirectX 10 NVIDIA graphics card, run the 64 bit version of Windows 7, have an Intel dual core CPU, 4GB of RAM and speak English?

Then you're average. Sooooooooooooo average. How does that make you feel, Mr Average? Does it make you feel… average?

This comes from the latest Steam hardware survey, which paints a statty picture of the slow march of progress. Quad core CPUs are slowly on the ascendancy, now boasting 35.9% of the chip market (dual core still leads, at 53.67%), while those once-scoffed at DirectX 10 cards have made it to 56.36% of the GPU market. DX11 doesn't look so pretty at 5.6%, however. Maybe if we had some games that looked really, truly, palpably better thanks to it?

Windows 7 continues to be slowly on the rise, with combined 64 and 32 bit lurking on 48.18% of Steam gamers' hard drives despite being a relative youngster. Nearly 25% of folks are still on Vista, bless 'em, which is outdone by Windows XP 32-bit by about 1%.

What else can I tell you? Well, the software data's interesting – that 63.05% of Steam users (who allowed the auto-survey to run, at least) are running Firefox says much about the sensible IE-fearing smarts of yer average PC gamer. And that 57.26% are using the £100+ Microsoft office perhaps says much about the Bittorrent aptitude of the average PC gamer. I'M GUESSING, OKAY. I HAVE NO FACTS WHATSOEVER TO SUPPORT THAT WILD STATEMENT, OKAY. Except that 29.41% of people have µTorrent installed.

Oh, and 36.63% of Steam users have Games For Windows installed. So it's very much out there, even if it's got a bad rep.
Steam for Mac's not looking super-healthy, alas – just 4.27% of Steam accounts which took the survey use OSX, and that's decreased slightly from earlier surveys. Still, if Steam can push out a really stonking OSX game day and date with the Windows version, I can still imagine that proportion spiking.

So how excitingly different are you from the average system? Go on, wave your willy all over the place if you must.