Steam survey - gaming computers

Miscellaneous Topics
#1

An interesting survey that Valve are conducting at the moment. I expect it mainly consists of HL gaming rigs, therefore represents a rather specific market segment, but the results are interesting nevertheless:

http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html

They’ve screwed up the RAM and processor features questions, network speed is obviously going to be biased towards broadband, and you have to take HL technology into account when looking at screen width etc, but here are some interesting numbers so far:

[]60% of surveyed CPUs are between 1.5 and 2.7GHz.
[]82% of users are running XP.
[]The CPU field is split 50:50 between AMD and Intel.
[]99.83% of machines are single-processor.
[*]60% of respondents prefer OpenGL; 32% prefer Direct3D.

#2

OOOOHHHHHHHHH!!!

:slight_smile: :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

Me smiles a lot :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

-ChrisM

#3

+1 ;D

#4

That’s not what it says… It says 56.50% use the opengl renderer in steam games (read “half-life”).

Considering the Direct3d renderer has had issues from the start, that’s hardly surprising. :wink:

#5

[quote]That’s not what it says… It says 56.50% use the opengl renderer in steam games (read “half-life”).

Considering the Direct3d renderer has had issues from the start, that’s hardly surprising. :wink:
[/quote]
Agreed, but thats ok. It means that they have current builds of OGL and we can use that too.

-ChrisM

#6

Seems to agree pretty much with my stats too :slight_smile: The bandwidth survey is of course massively skewed.

Cas :slight_smile:

#7

[quote]That’s not what it says… It says 56.50% use the opengl renderer in steam games (read “half-life”).
[/quote]
Agreed, you need to consider the source and how it skews the results. I’m not entirely sure how that particular question was phrased, but have seen it described as “Which do you prefer, OpenGL or Direct3D?”. Even if both libraries were well supported in HL and by people’s hardware, as the respondents are gamers it would basically come down to “who has better marketing / a better reputation?”. Not a question you can draw any conclusions from, but worth quoting for propoganda purposes! ;D

#8

[quote]Even if both libraries were well supported in HL and by people’s hardware, as the respondents are gamers it would basically come down to “who has better marketing / a better reputation?”. Not a question you can draw any conclusions from, but worth quoting for propoganda purposes! ;D
[/quote]
HL supports both ‘proper’ OpenGL (and for the era that basically means nVidia TNT class hardware) and ‘MiniGL’ which is basically a sub-set of OpenGL which is specifically for Voodoo class cards. Direct3D is also supported (though DX5 class drivers).

Considering that (at release) 3Dfx hardware was prolific (and remarkably good) its no suprise that OpenGL is considered as prefered. DX hardware at the time was limited to crappy S3 cards and similar Pile-O-Shite Cards ™.

Also, given that this is users of ‘Steam’, ValVe’s proprietry Pile-O-Shite ™ content delivery system, this is going to be mainly hardcore gamers. So its pretty certain they’ll be running nVidia or ATi cards and recent drivers.