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.

Comments

AMD vs Intel

[Ethon]

Wow...I didnt figure that the margin between Intel/AMD was so close...I always have just assumed that as far as gaming went, AMD had a significant lead. Learn something new every day I suppose :)

Re:AMD vs Intel

[slaker]

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.

This violates my 2nd amendment rights!

[Anonymous Coward]

A survey? This is none of their business! Pretty soon, they'll register us, and then they will take away our weapons.

They can have my unlimited gaussgun and Mp5 grenade launcher when they pry the joystick from my cold dead fingers.

Re:AMD the winner

[MerlynEmrys67]

Not sure how to read this - how was this data gathered ? 41% of people have HT technologies (is HT even available on AMD) and only about 25% of people had a processor fast enough to have HT enabled.

Is this a user feedback form - or does it gather the data directly from the system ?

Heh, interesting

[jayhawk88]

One hard-core Cyrix user out there.

Also, some fool is trying to run half life at 96 pixels?

And finally, nice to see all those Microsoft employees beta-testing XP SP2 are hard at work...

Re:Heh, interesting

[imr]

I used to play counter and action quake2 that way on a p200mmx. I had a better framerate and no dark places.

Re:Heh, interesting

[moonbender]

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.

Re:Heh, interesting

[jayhawk88]

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.

Hold on a sec

[Proud like a god]

Something's odd. In Other Settings (at the bottom of the article!) there's this: RDTSC 283,171 100.02 %

Er...

[Anonymous Cow herd]

Other Settings
RDTSC 283,171 100.02%

I wonder how they got that :-)

Re:Er...

[OppressiveGiant]

over 40% had hyperthreading... and fewer than 3% actually had processors that support hyperthreading(>3ghz). Something is up with those "other settings"

And the other winner: Nvidia

[Vaevictis666]

47.34% total for NVidia cards,
41.17% Unknown,
10.30% total Radeons,
1.18% Intel.

It's possible (though unlikely) that all the unknowns were ATI cards, but I think this is a clear win for NVidia.

OTOH, the most popular card is a GF4MX, which is actually a less capable card than my poor dead GF2TI, which didn't even make it on the list :P

Re:And the other winner: Nvidia

[gl4ss]

yeah, gf4mx - the ultimate jedi mindtrick.

"but it's a geforece 4!!! what you mean it sucks??"

Re:And the other winner: Nvidia

[BW_Nuprin]

Looking at the driver names, it looks at least 20-some percent of the users are using ATI cards. Perhaps pre-Radeon?

And I like this stat

[Creepy Crawler]

It's almost double for users who PREFER OpenGL than DirectX.

Perhaps there's some nasty problems related to high-poly and BSOD!

Re:AMD the winner

[Farmer Jimbo]

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.

WineX

[mahdi13]

I wonder how well the survey works with WineX...I'll have to try it later and see if I can get in that Windows Version: Other catagory :D

Steam Stress

[Dark Paladin]

I've been thinking this is the real reason why Half-Life 2 has been delayed. Don't get me wrong - I'm in no big rush, and since I don't anticipate an "OS X" client in, well, never, it will have to wait until I finally bother to upgrade my home PC.

But from what I've been seeing about Steam, I have the feeling that most of the delays have been figuring out how to make that system work right the first time so they don't have a "first day Ultima Online/Everquest/any other massive online game issue" out there.

A good thing, and it's interesting to watch the baby steps they take to break it (like with this survey) then probably analyze what worked and what didn't.

Opt-out or opt-in?

[xTown]

Is participation in this survey voluntary? I'm sure it's not; part of the Steam license probably says "we're going to gather data on you and you can't say boo about it." But I'd like to know for sure; I stopped playing HL when Steam came out.

Re:Opt-out or opt-in?

[Farmer Jimbo]

Participation in the survey is voluntary.

Re:Opt-out or opt-in?

[ctr2sprt]

Did you read your own comment? "Is A true? I'm sure A is false. But I'm not sure. This in no way affects me."

For what it's worth, participation is voluntary. So you were right to ask, wrong to be sure, right to be doubtful, and ultimately a waste of my time.

What about ATI and Nvidia

[superpulpsicle]

Forget Intel and AMD.

I am curious to see who really has the bigger market share between ATI and Nvidia. They have way more influence on game libraries and graphics call than both processor company IMHO.

Win 95

[rvw14]

Anyone find it interesting that 212 users are using windows 95?

Re:Stop beating the mule, ITS DEAD!

[actor_au]

They plan to release it in four ways:

1. Basic Retail Pack. Only Single Player with an option to upgrade to Multiplayer for a price over the internet.

2. Full Retail Pack. Single Player and Multiplayer in one pack.

3. Gold Retail Pack. Single Player, Multiplayer and all types of extra junk all crammed into it.

4. Steam. Which will be Multiplayer, Singleplayer and maybe include a few mods that teams are working on right now(valvE are supporting HL1 mod teams in this).

Valve want people to buy it over Steam for one good reason: Cash.
They get 100% of all revenue from Steam based purchases, effectivly cutting retailers, middlemen and their publisher(Vivendi Universal Games) out of the loop.
Which means that they get an arseload of money.

Steam Hammered

[sbryant]

The survey is quite interesting, as are the stats as to how many servers and players are online etc. Average player minutes last month: 1.160 billion! I'm guessing that's a US billion, which is 1000 x 1million; a UK and German billion (probably other places too) is 1million x 1million. Anyway, I was surprised at the AMD/Intel CPU distribution (about half each).

However, for all their ease of updates and cutting out middlemen for software retail etc, it sucks. As soon as an update like this comes out, everybody's steam client wants to update, the servers get overloaded and become effectively unavailable - I can't play online without updating, and I can't even play any of the steam games offline (offline play is part of this update). Must be hell for those with slower links.

If it worth joining a system, where you can't use it for 3 days when a large update comes out? I think the basic idea is good, but the implementation sucks raw eggs! They don't even use the browser settings and go through a proxy - that would save a lot of bandwidth, and reduce their system load. You could go further with something like BitTorrent, even.

-- Steve

ntel

[Ghost_3k]

Processor Vendor
GenuineIntel - 155,138 - 50.12 %
ntel - 1 - 0.00 %

"ntel"

Intel bugs again...
or someone running lin---s

Hyperthreading

[aSiTiC]

I'm surprised to see approximately 41% of those surveyed have Hyperthreading enabled. From what I know there are not very many processors that support this feature. Also considering that Intel has about 50% of those surveyed this means there are only 9% of Intel CPUS survey without HT? A little unbelievable...