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Valve Releases Hardware Survey Results

Posted by Zonk on from the i-know-what-you've-been-playing dept.

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."

7 of 77 comments (clear)

  1. confusing presentation by Profane+MuthaFucka · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

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    Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
  2. Re:Bandwith by FidelCatsro · · Score: 3, Insightful
    What I do find crazy is that there are some computers with 32 mb of RAM listed here. I'm surprised Steam even loaded! There are about a 100 people who have less than a 100 megs of RAM who are probably cursing 'coz HL2 doesn't work on their machines. And don't get me started on the 200 MHz machines which are listed!
    There is also alot of people who love messing with statistics ;)
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    The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
  3. PC Developers VS. Console Developers by CokoBWare · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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!

    1. Re:PC Developers VS. Console Developers by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 2, Insightful

      > 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?

      Having shipped both PC and console (PSX/PS2) titles, I can answer this.

      "Too many variables."

      _What_ is baseline?
      * Is it DX8, DX9? (aka Pixel Shaders 1 or 2)
      * What is the minimum MHz we can count on?
      * How much Video and System Ram can we count on?

      Baseline is a moving target. It's WAY easier to optimized for a fixed platform.

      It's a legitimate question, so I don't see why you should be flamed for asking. It's the answers you have to watch out for! :-)

      Cheers

    2. Re:PC Developers VS. Console Developers by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Postscript...

      Another reason this doesn't happen...

      If you're optimizing for yesterday, or even today's hardware, another game developer is optimizing for tomorrows hardware.

      Newer must be better right?! The market seems to think so...

    3. Re:PC Developers VS. Console Developers by Baikala · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Read some posts above. Two reasons basicaly, the extreme optimizations that can be done when you know exactly on what hardware your game is going to be run on, and the relative low res of a regular or even an "HD" tv set.

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  4. Re:Bandwith by FictionPimp · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Dont forget people running servers. Counterstrike doesn't take much for a good server.