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."

Comments

OpenGL beats DirectX for HalfLife 1

[Marc_Hawke]

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.

Re:bad phrasing

[Chris Mattern]

I took that survey; they don't ask the user, they ask the machine and get an exact count of memory, which they summarize here. As you point out, they summarize it badly, but the original data doesn't have that weakness.

Chris Mattern

Re:Mostly average

[Chris Mattern]

What shocked *me* was all those high-powered video cards--and they're starving their machines of memory. Almost *20%* fell into "128 Mb to 256 Mb" (which I don't think *includes* 256 Meg, so most of these guys are 128)? Oy. I only have a Radeon 9200 in my machine...but I have a Gig of memory, and it's worth it.

Chris Mattern

Re:OpenGL vs. DirectX?

[Enderwiggin13]

Your hardware is surveyed and submited after running the 3d test within CS:Source, after you've set up all your control/video/sound options. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that OpenGL is the default setting, and I'm sure that a large number of people get a game and click "New Game" right away without even bothering to check the settings, so they get the default setting of OpenGL submitted as their survey. I always like to at least check over the settings before I run a game for the first time. Even if they're all right, I like to make sure....cause I'm a nerd.

nitpick....

[Chilles]

Writeup:
...more than half a million responded.
Article:
...Unique Samples: 293423...
So that would be: "...more than a quarter of a million."

Gettimeofday(), brought to you by RDTSC.

[j1m 5n0w]

Read Time Stamp Counter. Used to count clock cycles for benchmarking.

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

Re:Games on DVD

[hunterx11]

The last two games I got for my Mac, Unreal Tournament 2004 and Battlefield 1942, were DVD-only. For once vendor lock-in on the hardware is an advantage, since one hasn't been able to get Macs with a DVD drive for a bit now.

Re:Quesionable data

[mcbridematt]

Its quite easy to change the CPUID string on Athlon series processors - a tool called CPUMSR can do it.

Not likely....

[rsilvergun]

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.