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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."

6 of 77 comments (clear)

  1. Bandwith by roseblood · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Bandwith by bad_fx · · Score: 2, Interesting

      One word: Steam.

    2. Re:Bandwith by rathehun · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Whats so strange?


      You *need* at least a 256 kbps line to play CS : Source, and Steam just sucks up bandwith, especially with the initial decryption or whatever. I know a friend who specifically arranged for a 512 kbps line so that he could play Source.


      And if I take India as a representative, $10 for 256 kbps works out, especially when you're shelling out $50 for the original game.


      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!


      R.

    3. Re:Bandwith by Dr.Opveter · · Score: 3, Interesting

      When i used to play Quake online i remember my 33k6 dial-up had a better ping than the 1.5mbit cable i got later.

      --
      Sample this!
  2. AMD/Intel split by dave-tx · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I think the most interesting point on this survey is the CPU split between Intel and AMD. Maybe I've been out of the loop for too long, but this is by far the highest percentage of AMD users I've seen in any survey.

    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!"

  3. Re:PC Developers VS. Console Developers by Low2000 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The thing that confuses me is if the Xbox has a 733Mhz processor and 64MB of shared RAM, why does it take, say, around 1.8 Ghz CPU, 512MB RAM and a mid range grafics card to display a similer level of graphics.

    I know the OS eats RAM and runs processes in the background but unless your system is terribly loaded with spyware and the like, that still leaves at least a couple hundred megs for the game and more then enough CPU cycles. IMO anyway.