Valve's Steam service shows the latest hardware trends - what tech is hot right now?
Valve's digital distribution and gaming management software, also known in the gaming realm as Steam, provides an easy way to grab access to your games - as well as hardware surveying for Valve.
They ask the users of the service to provide a simple scan of their rig to see what tech is running, and they've kept an eye on the gaming hardware for a long while, long enough for this to be a pretty accurate measure of the tech running in gamer rigs worldwide.
Here's our picks of the most interesting stats:
Processors: Intel rule the roost in percentage here, but it's not as high as they'd have you believe - AMD have 33.75% of the grunt here. The most popular Intel cpu speed is 2.3-2.69GHz, while AMD is a slightly lower 2.0-2.29GHz. We think AMD CPUs are still a great choice for budget systems!
Video Cards: The green team at NVIDIA own this area, with a huge 65.81% slice of pie, ATI having only 27.34%. It's a good sign of how hard ATI has been slammed at the lower price ranges - fourteen of the top fifteen cards are all NVIDIA. The 8800GT is the most popular card by far at 12.53% of all rigs, followed by the 8600GT and then the 4800 series (which includes the 4870, 4870X2 and 4890 etc). We think that while there are some nice choices from camp red, NVIDIA are still where it's at for budget gaming.
CPU Cores: Since the penetration of multicored CPUs came around, the times have been a-changing. Single cored CPUs have been dropping by roughly 3% each month, while dual cores have been rising by almost that much, sitting at 56.15%. Quad cores are popular enough too, with 14.64% of rigs running them. Nehalem is still rare in the gaming rigs, with only 0.05%. For budget gaming, stick with a dualcore - though you won't miss out on anything if you stretch to Quad.
Primary Display Resolution: It seems that 17" 4:3 monitors are still king here, as 24.01% of gamers still stick by them. Strangely a very small 1024x768 res remains second-most popular, taking 20.18% (we think this is due to higher framerates in competitive gaming). 22" 16:10 LCDs are next at 17.62%, with 19" 16:10 LCDs hitting 11.39%. If you're gaming, you really can't go past a nice big 22" widescreen.
That's just some of the categories that are interesting, and there's plenty more to look at from DX10 penetration to amount of HDD space, so head to the survey and check it out for yourself - where does your rig lie?
Issue: 111 | April, 2010