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Valve Releases Recent Hardware Survey Results

Posted by Zonk on from the feel-the-love-for-vista dept.

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."

5 of 86 comments (clear)

  1. DVD! by SanityInAnarchy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!)

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    Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
    1. Re:DVD! by 0123456 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "Jason Bergman (of 2K Games) a few years back posted [shacknews.com] that the problem with Steam is that it represents the "super hardcore" market (i.e., the people who play high-end first person shooters) and so it's not really representative of the rest of the market (that also spends most of the money)."

      Yeah, that'll be why so many Steam gamers have FX5200 cards, 40% of them use AGP systems, and most of them run their monitors at 60Hz.

      I'm continually surprised at how low-spec so many systems are in the Steam surveys.

    2. Re:DVD! by darkwhite · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The one that's really stumped me over the years is how ATI lost their spot on-top in the Steam survey. Do you think it might possibly be due to the fact that ATI has sucked and lagged badly behind nVidia in the past 2 years? They may be able to cobble together a massively overclocked monster with a higher power draw than a whole low-spec desktop, but like you say, they produce poor midrange products and have had a severe shortage of viable alternatives to cards in the 6000, 7000, and 8000 series. At some price points, I can now buy an nVidia card that draws half the power and works twice as fast as an ATI card at the same price point.

      Five years ago I'd never think I would be bashing ATI or AMD for dropping the ball, but here I am...
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  2. Good insight by ACS+Solver · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Good insight by WaZiX · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Heh. That was the first thing that leapt out at me as well. The second was the whole 60hz thing. Do people WANT to go blind? Ug. About all LCD's have a 60Hz refresh rate....