Lies, damn lies, and hardware

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By Ashton Mills
May 15, 2008

While Valve’s Steam was a great big PITA when it first arrived, it’s since matured into a good distribution and games management system. I find myself preferring to buy games from Steam because somewhere in my genome I have the can’t-be-assed gene, and going outside to actually buy something feels counter-productive. Buying online I don’t have to leave my chair. But I digress.

One of the more interesting features Steam has enabled is the hardware survey. Obviously it’s a useful tool for Valve to gauge the capabilities of hardware and in turn the target market of the games it (and other publishers) produce. But it’s also a fascinating insight into technology trends. At the time of writing the survey comprises responses from 1.3 million gamers from around the world. Let’s see what we can glean.

Last year in the survey, AMD and Intel were almost neck and neck. Now Intel’s Core2 Duo has seen Intel take the lead with a 15 per cent margin. And with Phenom being a bit of a let down, we can only expect this to grow in the coming months.

That said, despite dual-core processors from both AMD and Intel being available for a while now, two-thirds of the machines in the survey are still single core. Just over a third have dual-core, and just four percent are quad-powered.

In graphics NVIDIA dominates with just over a 60 per cent share, and of these the 8800 line leads them all, which shows how eager gamers are to upgrade to the latest GPUs. Just over a third are ATI/AMD based, and here the Radeon 9600 is on top. Keeping in mind it’s a global survey, and not every gamer has a large disposable income, it shows how a large chunk of the audience is still on older systems, with just over 30 per cent still using AGP (oh, you are too? then have we got news for you! -ed.) and 60 per cent with 256MB or less of VRAM. In fact, large 768MB cards (aka GTX or similar) are less than three per cent; not quite as common as you might think. If Valve or other developers use this a guide, there’s not much call to produce games with high-res textures that might require 768MB or more, since so few have the hardware to utilise it.

It’s a similar picture (pun!) for widescreen monitors – while widescreen users know that once you go wide you can never go back, most of the gaming world hasn’t cottoned on yet, at least going by the survey – just under a quarter use 16:9 displays, leaving almost a million of the respondents on 4:3 screens. However, one interesting trend here is the choice of widescreen display; the highest percentage goes to larger than 24in monitors (aka 27in and 30in), though 24in comes a close second. Clearly when gamers do decide to go large, they don’t do it by halves. Perhaps there’s a chunk of Atomic readers wrapped up in that statistic!

In audio land the reigning champion is Realtek AC97, forming 30 per cent of all machines. The X-Fi? Just under three per cent. Even if you consider the survey to just be a snapshot of Valve’s market, it’s clear the audio wars are over – and why not? Onboard sound has come a long way, and easily suffices for everyone except the purists.

Finally, the survey is very telling on Vista’s penetration, or lack thereof. Even after a year Vista has a dismal showing, with just over 15 per cent of the machines sporting Microsoft’s latest. Even less have DX10 enabled cards, with just nine per cent of respondents capable of using DX10. By contrast XP commands 80 per cent of the audience, over a million users in the survey. DX10’s uptake is definitely hindered by Microsoft’s decision to build it only for Vista, a strategy designed to try and drive Vista adoption. It clearly didn’t work.

There are other interesting trends, more than I can cover here. Suffice to say it’s probably one of the first global, gamer-focused, ongoingly (is that even a word? –ed) (no sub-ed) updated surveys made possible via current technology, and a good representation of the same. See where you sit in the community, and check it out.

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Issue: 111 | April, 2010

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