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Steam Update Shows FPS Gamer Stats
majestik writes "Valve Software today sent out a Half-Life 2 hardware survey via their Steam content delivery app to over 270,000 gamers (and counting!), collecting various hardware and software information about their PC systems to see how they'll measure up to the forthcoming FPS. Lotsa interesting data to check out, if you ever wanted to know what kind of systems today's FPS gamers use. And yes, if you're wondering, right now Intel takes 50.02% of the CPU market, leaving AMD with 49.98%." The stats are updated in real-time, and it seems this update has again stressed the Steam servers, with a message noting "the Steam network has been overloaded, causing many Steam users to be unable to login", though the effect is reportedly diminishing.
The survey comes up after the successful Steam software update. Network speed is self-reported, all the rest is automatically pulled from your system. Participation in the survey is volountary.
Participation in the survey is voluntary.
With a vendor string "CyrixInstead" - hilarious! I always thought "AuthenticAMD" was a nice parody of Intel's "GenuineIntel".
Not so smart: Where do people with 256 MB RAM fit in, "128 Mb to 256 Mb" or "256 Mb to 512 Mb"...? The numbers make me guess it's the former. Same goes for CPU speed.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
It's surprising in any case; Intel dominates in mass-market retail. Sure, you can get a Presario or an Emachine with an AMD CPU, but a quick glance at the shelves of your local Best Buy or Harvey Norman will find Intel boxes to be the norm. 66% of computers sold are brand-name models and the majority of those are going to have Intel inside.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Acutally I play it with software rendering. My ATI drivers have some sort of weird bug that only allows you to attempt to connect to a game once: When it goes into it's "Rendering" mode of graphics, it can't go out of that mode and get back in without exiting out of Half Life and restarting. In other words, if you don't connect to the server on the first try, or if you want to change servers, you have to exit out of Half-Life.
I'm sure this is just a driver quirk or something else rather silly, but seeing that anymore I only play Half Life for TFC once in a blue moon, I really don't feel the need to spend any time with it. Software mode isn't that bad really; sure it's not as pretty, but who cares really.