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Valve Releases Hardware Survey Results
Chris_Yates writes "A hardware survey containing over one million entries has been made public by Valve, the creators of Half-Life 2. Some interesting facts include: 65.89% now have SP2 compared to 17.04% for SP1, AMD and Intel almost split 50/50 with nVidia edging out ATI 50.72% to 41.03%. The Radeon 9800 and 9600 take the top two spots with 20% combined."
They made the same mistakes in presentation of this survey that everyone else seems to make. I have 1 gig of RAM. So, do I fit in the category of 512mb-1gig, or do I fit in the category of 1 gig to 1.5 gig? That's just a stupid mistake. Even if they collected the data properly, they aren't reporting it properly. Stupid, useless survey. OK, I see the first line that implies that the ranges are set up like this: [low-high). Is it so hard to carry that through the entire chart?
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
80% of the respondants(sp) in the survey have pipes that handle at least 256.0 Kbps.
Over 56% have 768.0 Kbps.
The largest responding group has 1,024.0 Kbps.
It's certainly a broadband world in Valveville.
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Does anyone else find their method of rating silly, especially in terms of RAM?
Say I have 1G of Ram. Am I "512 Mb to 1 Gb" or "1 Gb to 1.5 Gb"? Who knows? Same for any other memory amount, the ratings are unfortunately garbage.
Otherwise, an interesting survey, especially in that it shows much much gamers use AMD (47%) as compared to your average user.
XP SP 2 (Build 2600) 666,890 65.89 %
"And which one of you actually agreed to be profiled like this?"
:P
Well, let's go down the list of names and social security numbers they've collect...
"Derp de derp."
So, paying for any software is a bad thing? I don't care if they implement RFC 1149 for my gaming experience,as long as i like the game. Might as well say "buying a stupid piece of silicon that doesnt DO anything with out instructions!!"
As for the stats, you have an way to make money off of just yourself reporting stats to someone, please tell us more. I am sure if there was some sort of community/non-profit version we could all reply to that would be great but i don't know of any. Besides, the biggest value is to valve and their competitors and the data has been (to some extent) shared with the world,right? So the problem is.....??
And I am sure that there is no way to disable that kill-switch. Nope,never gonna happen. No one would every figure out a way around such a thing. You are so wise.
I mod everyone down who says "I'll get modded down for this." I hate to disappoint.
I just want to salute whoever the joker is that convinced the survey app that he had an "INTERWEBntel" processor.
---So, paying for any software is a bad thing? I don't care if they implement RFC 1149 for my gaming experience,as long as i like the game. Might as well say "buying a stupid piece of silicon that doesnt DO anything with out instructions!!"
Wow, talking about wiseness here, but nobody put cryptographic locks keeping me from using only certified OS'es... (oh yeah, people were up in arms about Palladium, which said exactly that).
When the lords above deem that you're not good enough for the community and forcibly delete your key to run the blasted program, guess what? Its nothing more than a plastic disk and a box.
---As for the stats, you have an way to make money off of just yourself reporting stats to someone, please tell us more. I am sure if there was some sort of community/non-profit version we could all reply to that would be great but i don't know of any. Besides, the biggest value is to valve and their competitors and the data has been (to some extent) shared with the world,right? So the problem is.....??
Aside the rambling, what exactly did you say?
You DO know ad providers (Doubleclick and other meat-space vendors) do buy legitimate profiles of audiences. If this program shows a statistically calculated margin of error, it would be worth a LOT.
---And I am sure that there is no way to disable that kill-switch. Nope,never gonna happen. No one would every figure out a way around such a thing. You are so wise.
Oh sheesh. Yeah, go warez it, retard. The people who wanna play online cant, and you wont be playing against them, now will you. And who said that a naughty program couldnt just instead encrypt all files it has access to? Thats what a certain old unix virus did.. "Talk to Valve about decrypting these files BY NOT PIRATING"
Damn right I'm wise.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I did agree to be profiled. It was very clearly optional.
# (/.);;
- : float -> float -> float =
Come on now and share your hardware specs
You'll be free
You'll be freeeeeee.
---
2x 2.666 Ghz Xeon 1GB R9700Pro -- it's absolutely worthless data in isolation.
Erm, everyone who participated agreed to be profiled......
When you logged into Steam a window popped up asking if you wanted to be part of the survey.
Paranoia's bad, Mmmkay?
I have no sig yet I must scream.
and this has what to do with your pointless comment regarding buying a box? The point is that everything is useless in the wrong context. At this point saying it is useless without internet is almost the same as saying the game is useless without a good graphics card.
Sorry it was hard for you to understand. does Doubleclick buy profiles from single induhviualls? If so, how much are people losing and how hard is it to cash in on this new-found wealth?
Other then you have made the sadly common mistake of calling such things pirating as well as assuming that anything thing that defeats drm is "warez", you have assumed it matters. Valve isn't going to turn off your purchase without reason or without recourse.
Your wisdom is without question, Sire. Thank you for your gift o' great lord.
I mod everyone down who says "I'll get modded down for this." I hate to disappoint.
OK, so Valve are being uptight with Steam, sure. But I know there won't be any problems playing HL2 if Valve suddenly implodes. There are people who saw to that shortly after the game's release, and in the case of Valve remote killing my HL2, I would have no compunction whatsoever employing their solutions.
Besides, if Valve adjusts their game specs to match better computers as a result from this survey, I will get something in return - a hotter HL2.
Language:
Korean (Adult) 22,241 2.19 %
Korean (Teen) 3,140 0.31 %
Never knew Korean language was actually specified as different for Adults and teenagers!
Bet english and a lot of other languages _could_ do the same.
Perhaps this speaks more to the demographic that Valve is serving, but I still find this statistic to be very important.
>> "What would the robut do? Frame someone!"
8.88% have over 250GB HDD? And to think I am fine with 20GB....
Didn't they have a similar survey last time?
Wait, I found it.
http://valve.speakeasy.net/
I participated in this survey, and one thing that strikes me as interesting is that there are a lot of people who are still holding onto the ATI 9XX0 series of hardware.
One question I have is... considering that console game developers push the absolute limits of the console platform, why don't PC game developers do the same with a baseline PC hardware config? Anything extra processing juice will be just gravy then.
Is it funny that as PC owners, we are forced to upgrade our equipment every year or two to get the experience with the games we want, where consoles don't have that at all except get the games?
Maybe this is why consoles are so popular. PC gaming hardware gets way to expensive year after year.
It's a conspiracy... I know it! Get the developers to make games for advanced hardware instead of pushing their engines and baseline hardware to the max with better code.
I love gaming, on any platform. But I know I'll get flamed for this... so... flame away!
I also noticed that my 2800+ Athlon 64 was reporting in the survey as a 1.8 Ghz Athlon, which it technically is, but still misleading.
One of my pet peeves has been 6-CD disk installs for the latest games. To date, the marketing mantra has emphasized the Wal-Mart crowd. However, the glaring finding from the survey shows an overwhelming proportion of users now have a DVD drive. Multi-CD productions now have no excuse. Make it DVD.
What I find interesting is that most players have DVD drives (85%), yet game companies consistently release majority in CD format..
The OP point was that PC game designers should be designing to the lowest common denominator of PC hardware. My point is: why would a gaming enthusiast want to game on a console if they had a choice? Your answer is one - if you have a limited budget, consoles are certainly a great entry level way to game. But let's say we have 3 classes of people:
(1) Gamers with only consoles, or consoles superior to their PCs
(2) Gamers with PCs only about as good as consoles
(3) Gamers with PCs superior to consoles
The author suggests that game designers cater to (2). I believe that would happen at the expense of (3), and that (1) and (3) are going to be significantly larger than (2). People who want to game on the PC tend to get hardware better than is available in a console. At the time the XBox came out, it was roughly equivalent to good-but-not-great PC gaming, and it has since completely fallen off the map. That's unsurprising, because it's about to be replaced with a next gen box. But will the next XBox even reach the plateau where PC gaming is right now? The high end system of choice right now is an SLI rig with dual nvidias, and can probably crush even the next gen xbox, especially when cranking up the AA/AF for better looking graphics.
So if developers geared toward a baseline performance optimization by sacrificing the high end, they'd be abandoned by the enthusiasts who are their core market. If people are on a budget, they buy consoles. If people are short on technical know how, they're unlikely to be PC gamers. If someone has strong tech knowledge and a desire and even a moderate budget, they can likely grab a pre-owned PC and/or collect Fry's bargain hardware, and grab a nice but second-gen card and end up with a pretty good PC game system for only marginally more than a console and a few games.
Unfortionately people are too ignorant to know that they're more interested in the upstream of your network than the downstream
and this info has been around for quite a while
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
And what about the 96,172 people running XP or 2000 but not using NTFS? Surely some mistake?
This sentence no verb.
Hmmm...
People running SP1 or SP2 68%
People running SP2 or SP1 32%
The best part of this survey is that in 2 catagories I am in 4 postitions:
I have 512MB-1GB AND 1GB-1.5GB of RAM
I have a 30GB-40GB and a 40GB-50GB drive
Also, my network speed is not an option, no matter what we are measuring, be it my 100Mb local network or my 3Mb net connection.
Duhhh, no shit? How many times have people repeated this fact that AMD is better than Intel in more ways than one?