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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."

14 of 86 comments (clear)

  1. GenuineTMx86 by SanityInAnarchy · · Score: 2, Funny

    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!
    1. Re:GenuineTMx86 by east+coast · · Score: 2, Informative

      Within the timeframe of the survey, yes. AFAIK this most recent survey took place in the last 5-6 days. I had my system polled for this over the weekend.

      So if a large sector of the Steam population didn't happen onto this in the last few days you're going to end up with some skewed results.

      I don't recall the last time the survey happened but I'm wondering if there is a wide swing in both the number of participants and the types of hardware/software used since most colleges are out. I know in the days when EQ1 was king there was always seemed to be a large drop off of players during college breaks.

      --
      Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
  2. 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!)

    --
    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 ddillman · · Score: 3, Informative
      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'll agree with the first two, but not the last. Running your monitor at 60Hz is perfectly fine for anyone using a flat panel, which is the current trend. My take on this was that it indicated a lot of folks using new(er) monitors rather than older CRT technology.

      --
      Little girls, like butterflies, need no excuse. -- L. Long
    3. Re:DVD! by default+luser · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

      Why are you surpsied? Many of these people only have Steam installed to play Counterstrike 1.6, whch is STILL more popular than CS:Source.

      I originally played Half-Life on a Rendition 4MB v2200 graphics card, on a machine with 64MB ram. I originally played Counterstrike on a 16MB Matrox G400. Is it any wonder you can play CS 1.6 today on any old Intel GMA 900-series with geat framerates?

      Also, you'd be suprised how smoothly CS:Source runs on a FX 5200 if you run it in DX7 or DX8 modes. Most serious CS:Source players play with all the details turned off anyway.

      The one that's really stumped me over the years is how ATI lost their spot on-top in the Steam survey. The first Steam survey, fueled by the impressive price / performance ratio of the 9600 series and the Half-Life 2 voucher program, put ATI on-top. It took two years of ATI continually ignoring the midrange, but they finally lost that spot to Nvidia's 6600 series. ATI continued to ignore the midrange, allowing the 7600 to become entrenched, and only now are they producing enticing midrange products.

      It's really amazing how accurate a picture this survey is of the PC 3D gaming industry.

      --

      Man is the animal that laughs.
      And occasionally whores for Karma.

    4. 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...
      --

      [an error occurred while processing this directive]
  3. 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....

    2. Re:Good insight by illumin8 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Other interesting points are that nVidia users are notoriously bad at upgrading their drivers,
      Having owned both ATI and NVidia cards, I think the reason for this is that the Nvidia drivers are just so much more stable and bug-free than the ATI drivers. With most ATI cards I've owned I had to upgrade my drivers every 2 weeks just to fix annoying bugs and try to resolve slow framerate issues. During the ATI 9x00 line of cards, it wasn't uncommon to get a 10% framerate increase from a driver update one week, then the next week get another 10-15% framerate increase from another driver update. In fact, the ATI drivers were so buggy and incomplete that people felt the need to release their own versions of ATI drivers just to fix some of the glaring bugs in them. I don't know if they've improved since then, but I also haven't bought an ATI card since then because Nvidia is just so much higher quality.
      --
      "When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
  4. Only in America by Winckle · · Score: 3, Informative

    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!

  5. Re:No need for email by transmetal · · Score: 3, Informative
    Funny you should mention that. It looks like Valve's going to be distributing ATI driver updates through steam. Quote from Gabe Newell...

    I'm pretty excited about finally getting some display drivers - the ATI announcement included that - where rather than having the situation they have right now where there are literally tens, close to hundreds of display drivers out there on people's machines, that everybody will have the most current, the most up-to-date driver, automatic bug-reporting and things like that. That's a nice step forward.
    http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid= 25081
  6. Obligatory by erareno · · Score: 5, Funny
    You just gotta wonder how the 2 people with "Unknown" for language are speaking....

    My Guess, Klingon.

  7. A problem with statistics such as these by MichailS · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?