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Steam Hardware Survey Results
richie2000 writes "Valve asked Steam users for their hardware specs and more than half a million responded. Check out the survey results. Perhaps the most interesting tidbit is that OpenGL beats Direct3D by a healthy margin."
Yeah, I noticed the disrepancy, but then remembered that the only game that's available on Steam in HalfLife1 right now. When that was written weren't we on DirectX 3? (I'd have to check the box at home.)
And, even more 'condemning' of this stat is that HL was based on Quake1(and a bit of 2) code, which was OpenGL ONLY, it didn't have a DirectX option.
Anyway...it's one for the stat books, but I really don't think it means anything, given the context.
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
The survey has bad phrasing.
If I have 1GB of RAM, do I select "512MB to 1GB" or do I select "1GB to 1.5GB"?
A shame, because it looked like a decent number of respondents and it would be valuable for game makers to use to gauge what platforms they should target.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
I bet most people here are about average on that scale, I know I am (except the...oooo...radeon 9800).
Aside from that, OpenGL? Yeah, I use OpenGL for HL because if I try to use D3D it crashes.
Way to go steam. I use D3D for everything else though currently.
What's even more interesting is that the CPUs are split almost 50-50 between Intel and AMD.
Unfortunately, the major computer vendors are not offering many choices in the way of AMD processors.
It seems to me that the mainstream PC vendors better jump on the AMD bandwagon or else more and more users are going to be building their own, cheaper and faster.
that there is no Linux or Mac gaming market!
I mean, look at it, they have Windows, Windows, and more Windows! Obviously, only Windows users buy games!
[end sarcasm]
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
What is RDTSC and why is it so brilliant that it breaks even the bounds of mathematics?
I'd say the most interesting part is the Intel vs. AMD part. It might as well be 50/50 looking at those stats. Not what you might have expected.
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How are they measuring this?
My guess is that they would be reading ALL the games on EVERYONE's computer, and determining if it uses an OpenGL renderer, a DirectX renderer, 'software', or 'other'. Then how do they determine which renderer each piece of software uses? Do they have a massive database of every game ever written? What about games that offer both DX and OGL?
Most everything else is straight-forward, but I don't get HOW they measured this category. (Or WHAT they are really measuring.)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Look at the "CPU ID" list - ValveIsGreat?
True, it is only one entry, but is this a remnant of test data, or has somebody hacked Steam?
And speaking of "hacking" - has anybody run Steam under Wine? I know I completed both OpFor and BlueShift under Wine. How would that confuse things?
www.eFax.com are spammers
I can't belive how even the CPU types are. It's *nearly* 50/50 between Intel and AMD, which is quite interesting. How the hell does two giants such as these manage to share the market so even? ;)
Writeup:
...more than half a million responded.
...Unique Samples: 293423...
Article:
So that would be: "...more than a quarter of a million."
Ok, for the top end of the market, games really need to start being DVD only.
Survey says 77.93% of the machines had a DVD drive. Start putting games out only on DVD, and that will rise quickly.
I bought my first DVD game in 1998. I'm damn tired of seeing my game wallet have a full page just dedicated to one multi CD game. Lets get the market moved to DVD-Rom before BD-Rom starts in...
... a few things that struck me:
:)
- what kind of CPU can currently run above 3.7GHz?
- unless I completely missed something it does seem that there are very few (if none) nvidia 6800-class (standard, GT or ultra) cards around (my local hw shops have been backordered on these for MONTHS, practically impossible to buy). Also given how many 'older' video cards are around no wonder very few games are willing to push the video HW requirements
- what processor vendor is named 'ValveIsGreat'? what about the Euro symbol?
- why do 33 people run with an horizontal resolution of 832 pixels ?!?
- what video card can run in 49bpp? and what about 6bpp (EGA?)?
- there are two versions of the Korean language?!?!? (Adult and Teen)
- wow, 288 people have more than 250GB free hd space (!)
-- the cake is a lie
So these results are based on Half Life? This game is ancient, and 10% of people (more than 25000) play the game at resolutions LOWER than 640x480? This is the least credible survey I've ever seen, and it's more ridiculous if it's true that this data is collected automatically.
You gotta feel sorry for those 11 people with 10GB HDD's... And that one guy speaking an unknown language! I bet he's pretty lonely!
Are these people *blind*? That's... what did we used to call it, HiColor?
I *remember* what that looked like. It was great if you were used to 256-color
mode, but when SVGA systems came out supporting 24bpp, we all abandoned that
graphics mode, because 24bpp looked so much better. At least, I *thought*
everyone abandoned 16bpp in the mid nineties. Apparently the gamers *still*
haven't. I find this ironic, given that in most other respects their specs
for hardware are fairly high-end. And, 16bpp fails particularly badly to
render colors in the darker portions of the spectrum (browns and so on), which
games tend to favor, so I thought.
Gah, personally I'm looking forward to 64bpp, so we can finally get things like
wood grain to actually look moderately close to remotely similar to real. Can
someone explain why gamers don't seem to care about color?
I'm also just a bit surprised that 1024x768 was so overwhelmingly much more
common than 1024x768 -- I would have guessed them about equal.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
> I'm also just a bit surprised that 1024x768 was so overwhelmingly much more
> common than 1024x768 -- I would have guessed them about equal.
Err, more common than 1280x1024, I mean.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
It's actually useful for more than just benchmarking.
The time stamp counter is incremented every instruction cycle, and it lives in a register on x86 processors, so it can be read very quickly. In linux, time is kept by the periodic interrupt timer (PIT) which causes an interrupt at some interval, like 100 times a second. If your program calls gettimeofday(), the current time is calculated as boot time + jiffies (the number of PIT interrupts recieved since boot time) + (current tsc value - tsc value at the last interrupt)/(cpu frequency). Programs can also call rdtsc directly, and save themselves from making a system call, though this is only useful if they only care about relative time, not absolute time. There was some talk awhile ago about making "jiffies" visible to user space through some sort of memmory mapping trickery, so gettimeofday could be implemented completely in user space, but I'm not sure what became of the idea.
I have no idea what the TSC is used for in windows, but it's probably something similar.
-jim
Jesus, what's wrong with 32 (RGB-10bit)??
1024 discrete levels is about as good as your ever going to get on a CRT or LCD with the contrast ratios available to you.
Studios use 16-bit per channel, but that's mostly because they have lots of inbetween processing stages and the projectors can potentially have a much higher dynamic range.
That is, so dark parts can be very dark, and light parts can be very light without saturation...
And still that's only 48-bits. So where do you get 64? RGBA*2?
I'd at least drop that alpha part in the backend of the renderer/frontend to the DAC, as it could only slow things down.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Anyone remember the mini-patch released shortly after CS 1.5 came out where ATI cards were crashing every 30 seconds to a minute in Direct3D? I switched mine over to OpenGL then got the fix and never really switched it back (rocking an nVidia card these days so...) I think a lot of users don't know the difference.
http://www.digitalvoodoo.net/products/10bit/
Downgrade your favourite game from 32BPP to 16BPP and enjoy a 20% framerate increase. 16BPP is exponentially less work for your GPU to crunch and put onscreen. Just like 1024x768 is exponentially fewer pixels to render than 1280x1024.
Except, oops, it did.
There are varying levels of 16bit quality. Undithered or on cards that do rgb555 instead of 565 it can easily look like crap, but in other cases the quality can be good enough to make it a worthwhile tradeoff for a slight performance improvement, on those video cards that still render 16bit faster.
1. Valve asked Steam users for their hardware specs and more than half a million responded.
Steampowered site says: Unique Samples: 351563
This page last updated: 8:51pm PST (04:51 GMT), September 22 2004
2. Perhaps the most interesting tidbit is that OpenGL beats Direct3D by a healthy margin.
This part is not relevant, since you can play with either Direct3D or OpenGL for the same (or nearly the same) quality for HalfLife 1 and Counterstrike 1.x.
And if I'm not mistaken, OpenGL is the first and default option, so it's not surprising if most people never changed that option.
The PC gaming market is a joke for one major reason: the CD-ROM binder you get with every game purchase. Why should I slog through 3 discs for Doom 3, or 6 for Unreal Tournement 2k4?
If you look at the numbers, 78% of people use DVD-ROM drives in their PCs. I'd like to use my DVD-ROM drive (which I've had for 3 years) as something other than a way to watch DVD movies on my PC. Yet, with the expection of a handful of special releases (Sims 2 DVD, Unreal DVD), most stuff for the PC still comes on a butload of CDROMs, even though the people most likely to buy the damned things are already onto stuff that's been cheap and available for years.
You know what I like about my Xbox? No multi-disc games! I hope Half-Life 2 comes on DVD-ROM only. It could be the next big change, much like how Quake 3 was 3D Accelerator only.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Major computer vender's will go with whoever gives them the best discouts. Intel overcharges on the retail chain, but you can bet the OEMs are doing fine. They wouldn't stick with Intel otherwise.
Besides, Intel's marketing campaign allows OEM's distinguish their product. After all, why would you want a crummy AMD when your can have Intel Inside (TM)? Intel's marketing campaign gives OEM's an excuse to jack up prices on Intel based computers. I talk to people all the time who are so proud of themselves for buying the very best computer Dell has. Even had it custom built. These kind of idiots want to spend more money. Intel provides a convient reason to do so.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
This is easy to explain: 1. 99% of all CS hacks out there require openGL. Apparently it was much easier for them to hack openGL than D3D. 2. The D3D renderer in HL1/CS sucks. It used to be full of bugs. I think they have fixed most of those in the last year or so, but Valve never did optimize it enough to keep up with their openGL renderer so the fps is lower in D3D.
Maybe because some of us wouldn't notice the difference between 16, 24 and 32 bit unless we looked for it? It's like audiophiles who complain about mp3s being lossy - a lot of people don't notice it, so don't care.
It's that Direct3D doesn't even WORK. I've tried to switch to the D3D renderer on both Nvidia and ATI video cards and on both D3D rendering does not work. So the reason OGL looks so popular is probably because it's the only option that works for most people.
XP SP 1 (Build 2600) 183,809 46.30 %
XP SP 2 (Build 2600) 100,859 25.41 %
XP (Build 2600) 64,849 16.34 %
look at the percentage of gamers running XP that have not installed Service Pack 2
and we wonder why 6 month old exploits still infect millions of computers...
Tapeworm
Wow its crazy to think that only 59 other people run at 2048X1536 and only 14 other people that have less than 10 gigs of free space, dosent any one else have kazaa?
Statistically speaking this is next to useless. Okay, when I loaded the Steam survey up, I had absolutely no intention of buying HL2, which is what the survey is for. That might mean that they are basing HL2's defaults and performance on this and previous surveys.
Now, that means that you will only get the people who THINK they can run HL2 to actually reply and there've been rumours around for years that the specs required for HL2 will be phenomenal. This is going to bias this survey towards high-end answers which will mean that the actual game will require or assume you have them. The hype that surrounds a game's performance determines it?
This might sound petty but when you consider that I never thought in a million years that my PC would ever run anything on the source engine and CS:Source actually matched performance for CS on the same computer then you have a problem.
My computer is a 1.2Ghz, 512Mb with a PCI (yes, PCI) Geforce4 MX. This is very low-end by modern standards but if I hadn't tried CS:Source demo, I wouldn't even bother to think about Source or HL2 until I'd upgraded whereas in fact it is no less playable than a game which I'm perfectly happy playing (I get constant 25+ fps in CS and CS:S and I don't care what you think, that's more than good enough).
Also, it looks like someone's either been tampering with the survey or the survey's results are not always accurate (the 6bpp entries etc.). This means that this survey isn't even worth taking a rough estimate from for any practical purpose.
Well... there's simply two kind of gamers out there.
The first, which I am and assume you are, marvel at the exerience a game has to offer. From the aural and visual wonders the game presents to how well it "sucks you in" to the environment making you temporarily forget that you're sitting in front of a computer and instead hacking away at zombies, aliens, evil marines, and other such enemies.
The second, which my best friend would be, view a game purely as a challenge of mastery. My friend has a fairly hoss machine by most standards, but only keeps the visual and audio quality high for the first few days where he is introducing himself with the game... or beating the singleplayer. Then he gets serious, stripping away all the fancy bells and whistles in order to get to the core of competition without any kind of distractions. This includes turning down resolutions, reducing color spectrum in some cases, using compressed textures when available... all in an effort to squeeze out as much performance possible (even after the point that more performance really won't make any difference). One technique in HL and most Quake based games that relies on such tweaking is the bunny hop. Without going into a whole lot of details you can generally say that the higher your fps the more successful you will be at bunny hopping (it gets easier in a way).
For those of us who could care less about bunny hopping or other performance related aspects of gaming, higher visual and aural quality will usually abound.
All in all, the gaming community seems to be divided somewhere down the middle on this kind of thing.
> Maybe because some of us wouldn't notice the difference
Like I said: blind. These are probably the same sort of people who think
JPEGs look "good".
> It's like audiophiles who complain about mp3s being lossy - a lot of
> people don't notice it,
There's a word for people who don't notice the lossy compression in MP3: deaf.
That's like listening to a dirty cassette tape on a battery-powered player with
carbon-zinc ("flashlight") batteries that are wearing out, and not noticing.
How could you not *notice* something like that, something so distracting that
a normal person has difficulty willfully ignoring it? Would you "notice" if
a fire alarm went off while you were standing right under it? Would you
"notice" a flashing red and blue light in your rearview mirror?
Yeesh. I'm not a very observant person. There's a lot of stuff I don't
notice. But stuff like that is... impossible to not notice, impossible to
ignore. It reaches out and forcefully grabs your attention and squeezes.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I think that's quite accurate. I am very much the latter. During a recent upgrade I changed the UT2004 details from basically all off/low to almost all on/high and didn't really notice the difference. The vehicles still had the same shape, the weapons still did the same thing, no big difference as far as I'm concerned, except that my framerate was higher. I usually notice pretty graphics for the first few days of playing something, but after that I'm fairly indifferent to them. In fast-action games anyway.