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Valve Releases Recent Hardware Survey Results
Freastro writes "Last week, Valve reset their on-going Hardware Survey in order to 'keep on top of what kind of hardware everyone out there is running.' Little has changed statistically since their first 200,000 responses, and it gives some interesting insight into what hardware and versions of Windows people are actually running. Their news article gives the following statistics and the full results can be found on their Valve Survey Summary page. According to the survey, 'Just over 1% of respondents can run a DX10 path for graphics. About 78% of you have microphones plugged in for voice communication. This will help you out a lot in TF2. A little under 5% of you have upgraded to Vista. Around 20% of your PCs are running multiple CPU cores."
Am I to understand that exactly one person has tried running a Valve game on a Transmeta processor?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
With 95% of these people owning DVD drives, can we please move to DVD-ROM as an industry standard, and drop support for the 10-CD-in-a-box versions?
(Just in time for the PS3 and xbox 360 to go to HD formats, or in other words, about damned time!)
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I really like Valve's surveys. They provide a good insight about what hardware people have... the respondents are obviously gamers, and Valve provides very sober results that counter the claims of some l33t kidz that everyone has 2+ GB of RAM and a dual-core CPU. This time, I'm impressed by the high amount of people still working on 512 MB RAM, and the relatively high amount of GeForce FX 5200 cards. As many remember, those were a disaster, with Shader 2.0 support on paper while slowing down to 2 FPS maximum as soon as any scene with them is rendered. Other interesting points are that nVidia users are notoriously bad at upgrading their drivers, and that 96% of multi-GPU users use SLI, with only 4% for ATI Crossfire. Hmm. Of course, since this is Slashdot, I am obliged to assert my happiness that only 5% are using Vista and call them poor souls.
Looking at the video card update list I wonder if valve might want to put a front end filter to the database information that would email people with links to updated drivers for your cards.
"Valve collects statistics on your machine for analysis. Before this data reaches our database and is annonymized it is preprocessed to provide you with notices like this. For a look at the overall statistics we collect please visit Valve at VVV.
Your hardware, a XXX video card is using driver YYY. Please be advised the vendor ZZZ for this card has published an updated driver that will most likely increase your video card performance. This driver is available at WWWW. "
One thing I have noticed about PC games releases in recent years, in Europe most games are on one or two DVDs, but in the USA almost all releases are on large numbers of multiple discs, which was a bit of a shock to me when I spent some holiday money in a games shop!
Just pop it up through a Steam update, that also provides a convenient wrapper around the nVidia/ATI driver downloads/installers. Note that nVidia, at least, does not actually provide any kind of auto-update for their drivers, so Steam is as good a place to do that as any.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
This is wonderful news, nobody is upgrading to Vista! Just like Luke Skywalker, now we can assault the M$ Death Star, overload the reactor, causing a chain reaction that will destroy it from the inside out! Then, we can bring about a New Empire, this one based around the Almighty Ubuntu!
Who is with me?
24.39% have more than 250gigs of space. That's room for like half the internets p0rn!
Man I thought I was the last one to let that weak card go. I do remember liking the image quality a great deal at the time though but not enough to compensate for 7-15fps in Doom 3. Please people upgrade your video cards!!
Morality, filters both ways.
This is derived from their Steam software, yes? If so, the insight is on Steam subscribers' hardware, and it's probably useful to extrapolate it out to gamers, but beyond that it gets a little dicey, no?
Note that the survey did not ask for multi-core CPUs but rather the number of physical CPUs.
I didn't realize that so many people had multiple CPU machines - over 20%!
If only we could fall into a woman's arms without falling into her hands
Or are there still Windows 98 or ME users out there? (wouldn't be surprised) It's unfortunate they don't get a little more specific about that.
And still that category is only 0.1%? I wonder if that is the usual proportion of linux/wine gamers.
Or does wine showup in whatever OS you set it to (e.g. "Windows XP")?
My Guess, Klingon.
is that you only see what people use NOW, not what they might want to use but does not work well.
I have sent E-mails to various websites over the years that only work with IE to complain about this fact, and received answers that "We focus on IE because according to our logs that is what people use". Well duh. I'd be surprised if you got any data at all on Mozilla then.
In this instance it would for example be folly to assume that DX10 is uninteresting since most people can only run DX9. It may well be the case that people are holding off both Vista and DX10 because Valve games don't use it - but the second they started implementing it on a broad scale people would buy 8800's by the dozen?
It's astounding how many people (gamers no doubt) don't have 1GB memory, dual cores, and a sound card of all things, the standard hardware of average users must be insanely low.
A lot of people are surprised about the lack of "uber" hardware.
My guess is that a lot of these people are playing the old CS - not exactly a demanding game.
It's true, the 360 actually hasn't gone HD-DVD yet.
To clarify, I'm guessing that by the time PC games finally standardize on DVD, there will probably be more than a few 360 games that are HD-DVD only.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
If a game is going to require you to drop $50 on the game and $200 on a video card, another $40 or so to buy an optical drive really isn't much. That's $40 or so for a DVD burner; you could probably spend less than $20 now for a cheap DVD-ROM drive -- less than the game itself!
Any games I ever release (probably indie/homebrew) will be on CDs only if they fit on less than one CD. Otherwise, DVDs, or a later standard.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I notice many people commenting on the high numbers of old cards. I'm personally not all that surprised. I play DoD:S a lot, and I recently upgraded from an X850 series to an x1950 series...and after about a half hour of playing, disabled nearly every whiz-bang graphics feature it offered that my old card didn't. The biggest issue was lighting...maps that were too bright, or that had poor placement / aiming of lights, resulting in bright spots fading down to dark spots, whereas on the old card lighting would be more uniform. It defeats the whole point of playing on an 'orange' map if you turn on HDR. While the new card does wonders for F.E.A.R. and allows me to now play Vanguard, I find myself disliking some of the effects it has on older games.
Unpleasantries.
Steam is not a system only for the Half-Life series and mods. It also includes low, low, low end games like Bookworm which would be ported to cell phones if text entry wasn't so difficult and X-Com: TOTD was practically considered to be abandonware for almost half a decade (if you search around abandonware websites enough its still possible to find old DOS copies, it was originally released in 1996). The fact that the average level of system standards among Steam users has decreased since the first survey is nothing of interest. This is on par with Ford releasing a new line of low priced/budget cars and then announcing that the average price on all their cars being sold decreased since the 90's.