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First Person Shooters (Games) PC Games (Games) Entertainment Games

Steam Update Shows FPS Gamer Stats 101

Posted by simoniker from the watch-the-battle-develop dept.
majestik writes "Valve Software today sent out a Half-Life 2 hardware survey via their Steam content delivery app to over 270,000 gamers (and counting!), collecting various hardware and software information about their PC systems to see how they'll measure up to the forthcoming FPS. Lotsa interesting data to check out, if you ever wanted to know what kind of systems today's FPS gamers use. And yes, if you're wondering, right now Intel takes 50.02% of the CPU market, leaving AMD with 49.98%." The stats are updated in real-time, and it seems this update has again stressed the Steam servers, with a message noting "the Steam network has been overloaded, causing many Steam users to be unable to login", though the effect is reportedly diminishing.
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Steam Update Shows FPS Gamer Stats More

Steam Update Shows FPS Gamer Stats

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  • AMD vs Intel (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ethon ( 759020 ) on Thursday March 04, 2004 @04:46PM (#8467894) Homepage
    Wow...I didnt figure that the margin between Intel/AMD was so close...I always have just assumed that as far as gaming went, AMD had a significant lead. Learn something new every day I suppose :)

    • Re:AMD vs Intel (Score:3, Informative)

      by slaker ( 53818 )
      It's surprising in any case; Intel dominates in mass-market retail. Sure, you can get a Presario or an Emachine with an AMD CPU, but a quick glance at the shelves of your local Best Buy or Harvey Norman will find Intel boxes to be the norm. 66% of computers sold are brand-name models and the majority of those are going to have Intel inside.

      • Which just goes to show that a majority of a majority is not always a majority. As the US electoral system demonstrates so very well.
    • as the other reply touched on, Intel is sold in all the retail boxes.

      among harder core games maybe AMD stats would be better, but a lot of the people playing steam games are teens who know little about computers and are using their family (or personal, but provided by family) computers that were most definately retail purchased. Although for the %'s to end up this way, I would have to assume that a good amount of those retail boxes were AMD (not a huge amount, but enough to impact the stats).

      What diss

    • I was amazed that the score wasn't more heavily in intel's favour! All those OEM boxes and cheap nasty Celerons have to sell in droves. What I really want to know, if this is what the proportion of gamer PC's looks like, is why aren't developers optimising for 3Dnow! or at the very least the Athlon architectures instead of/as well as the intel architecture. So they can sell games to office workers? I don't know.

  • This violates my 2nd amendment rights! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 04, 2004 @04:47PM (#8467916)
    A survey? This is none of their business! Pretty soon, they'll register us, and then they will take away our weapons.

    They can have my unlimited gaussgun and Mp5 grenade launcher when they pry the joystick from my cold dead fingers.

  • Heh, interesting (Score:5, Funny)

    by jayhawk88 ( 160512 ) <jayhawk88@gmail.com> on Thursday March 04, 2004 @04:54PM (#8467995)
    One hard-core Cyrix user out there.

    Also, some fool is trying to run half life at 96 pixels?

    And finally, nice to see all those Microsoft employees beta-testing XP SP2 are hard at work...
    • Personally, I liked the CPU stat
      Below 200 Mhz 9

      I think my parent's wordprocessor could run HL2 better than a 200 mhz.
      • Well, (most?) games on Steam are based on the Half-Life engine, which will run on a Pentium. I ran Half-Life (and Counterstrike) on a P166MMX with a Voodoo 3 (128MB of RAM baby, yeah!) and it was almost playable with the optimised OpenGL minidriver thingy.

        I'd guess a few people have installed Steam on such old beasts, but I doubty they'll be buying Half Life 2 for them.
    • Game Renderer: Software 1.41%

      here too: who would have guessed they exist?!

      or is this just proof of how meaningless the survey is?

      • I'm guessing people at work with a beefy workstation but no 3d support.

        Counterstrike and Halflife are old enough to be playable like that...
      • In some article/interview with Valve they disclosed that according to their statistics a significant amount of people played Half-Life using software rendering. I suppose the figure includes both people with old hardware and laptops with sucky graphics hardware. (UT2004 includes a software renderer, specifically to cater for otherwise powerful laptops with sucky graphics hardware.)

        • Re:Heh, interesting (Score:3, Informative)

          by jayhawk88 ( 160512 )
          Acutally I play it with software rendering. My ATI drivers have some sort of weird bug that only allows you to attempt to connect to a game once: When it goes into it's "Rendering" mode of graphics, it can't go out of that mode and get back in without exiting out of Half Life and restarting. In other words, if you don't connect to the server on the first try, or if you want to change servers, you have to exit out of Half-Life.

          I'm sure this is just a driver quirk or something else rather silly, but seeing
      • Well, I have a year-old laptop with a sucky (8MB) video card, though it has a 1.4GHz processor and 512MB of RAM - it doesn't do alpha blending very well (slows to a crawl), meaning that it practically dies whenever I dunk underwater. Because of that, I tend to keep it in software mode when playing.


        That said, I'm no big FPS gamer, and I don't play on Steam, so I'm not a part of that number.

    • There are a couple of people using Transmeta in there. (GenuineTMx86)

      -prator

    • Re:Heh, interesting (Score:4, Informative)

      by moonbender ( 547943 ) <moonbenderNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Thursday March 04, 2004 @07:07PM (#8469872)
      With a vendor string "CyrixInstead" - hilarious! I always thought "AuthenticAMD" was a nice parody of Intel's "GenuineIntel".

      Not so smart: Where do people with 256 MB RAM fit in, "128 Mb to 256 Mb" or "256 Mb to 512 Mb"...? The numbers make me guess it's the former. Same goes for CPU speed.

  • Hold on a sec (Score:5, Funny)

    by Proud like a god ( 656928 ) on Thursday March 04, 2004 @04:56PM (#8468022) Homepage
    Something's odd. In Other Settings (at the bottom of the article!) there's this: RDTSC 283,171 100.02 %

  • Er... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Cow herd ( 2036 ) on Thursday March 04, 2004 @04:57PM (#8468038) Homepage
    Other Settings
    RDTSC 283,171 100.02%

    I wonder how they got that :-)

  • And the other winner: Nvidia (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Vaevictis666 ( 680137 ) on Thursday March 04, 2004 @05:05PM (#8468157)
    47.34% total for NVidia cards,
    41.17% Unknown,
    10.30% total Radeons,
    1.18% Intel.

    It's possible (though unlikely) that all the unknowns were ATI cards, but I think this is a clear win for NVidia.

    OTOH, the most popular card is a GF4MX, which is actually a less capable card than my poor dead GF2TI, which didn't even make it on the list :P
  • Credit Card Expirey date...

  • And I like this stat (Score:3, Troll)

    by Creepy Crawler ( 680178 ) on Thursday March 04, 2004 @05:08PM (#8468230)
    It's almost double for users who PREFER OpenGL than DirectX.

    Perhaps there's some nasty problems related to high-poly and BSOD!

    • I found Half-Life crashed horribley (as in BSOD[1]) when I tried to run it under Direct3D on my Windows 2000 box.) That's why I use OpenGL. Plus I think Half-Life is supposed to be better performing under OpenGL anyway, although that's probably a moot point on 2GHz machines with a game with a Pentium (no bloody 2, 3 or 4) as it's minimum requirements.

      [1] The only BSOD Windows 2000 has even given me on that box. But I only use it for games and stuff, I use an iBook for most browsing.

    • DX never worked properly for me with HL (decals were smudged). Not suprising, since it's based on the Quake engines from id, and id don't do DX at all (last I checked anyway).
    • Well that's because back when HL was made, OpenGL was king and DX sucked the big one, oh my how the tables have turned since. Although, if we ever get to see OGL 2.0 it might go back to how it was, only time will tell.

  • Intel and AMD? (Score:2, Funny)

    by arrow ( 9545 )
    I don't have an Intel or AMD you insensitve clod [via.com.tw]!
    • really? is the VIA C3 any good?
      • Yeah, it's not too bad for low cost machines.

        The only complaints I have is more specificly in the cheap machines built with them. The powersupplies are total crap.
        • I'm also a satisfied C3 user. Specifically, I own a 1GHz C3, with the newer Nehemiah core (the one with the full-speed FPU).

          They're good for a low-heat, low-noise setup, and perform decently considering their intended use.

          I've never seen them as part of a retail machine, though. Maybe as part of a barebones kit, but I'm not sure. How did you purchase yours?

          In any case, I built my C3 system from scratch, and haven't had any hardware problems (except for a finicky optical drive).

          ~~LF
  • 128 Mb to 256 Mb - 24.91 %
    256 Mb to 512 Mb - 53.66 %

    • Ah but if the details are pulled by the app and not manually submitted, it wouldn't actually count them twice or split the votes.
    • Yeah, that could get confusing. Usually for stats like this the second value is not included. So you'd have 128Mb to 255.999Mb.

      Oddly enough, my system with a single 512Mb stick of ram reports to windows that it has 511Mb - so my 512Mb system would still be stuck in the 256 to almost 512 bracket :(

  • I'd wish they would stop trying to beat the dead mule and just release the updates every 3-6 months via traditional means. Stream sucks, and we all know it. And for those of you who dont care, ever wondered how they will release HL2? *snigger*

    • Re:Stop beating the mule, ITS DEAD! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by actor_au ( 562694 ) on Thursday March 04, 2004 @06:24PM (#8469389) Homepage
      They plan to release it in four ways:

      1. Basic Retail Pack. Only Single Player with an option to upgrade to Multiplayer for a price over the internet.

      2. Full Retail Pack. Single Player and Multiplayer in one pack.

      3. Gold Retail Pack. Single Player, Multiplayer and all types of extra junk all crammed into it.

      4. Steam. Which will be Multiplayer, Singleplayer and maybe include a few mods that teams are working on right now(valvE are supporting HL1 mod teams in this).

      Valve want people to buy it over Steam for one good reason: Cash.
      They get 100% of all revenue from Steam based purchases, effectivly cutting retailers, middlemen and their publisher(Vivendi Universal Games) out of the loop.
      Which means that they get an arseload of money.
      • There are actually two methods to buy it over steam. You can pay for HL2 itself and get the Full Retail pack, just only over steam, but you'll always own it.

        The other Option, is if you subscribe for 10$ per month to Steam, you'll get access to all Valve games you have not purchased, so you could play Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter Strike: Condition Zero, and anything else they released, so long as you subscribed. Of course if you bought any game before or during you'd still keep it after your subscr
  • Rally the troops AMD, time to kick some intel ass

    AuthenticAMD 50.02 %
    GenuineIntel 49.97 %

  • WineX (Score:3, Funny)

    by mahdi13 ( 660205 ) <icarus.lnx@gmail.com> on Thursday March 04, 2004 @05:45PM (#8468805) Journal
    I wonder how well the survey works with WineX...I'll have to try it later and see if I can get in that Windows Version: Other catagory :D

  • Steam Stress (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Dark Paladin ( 116525 ) * <jhummel.johnhummel@net> on Thursday March 04, 2004 @05:45PM (#8468806) Homepage
    I've been thinking this is the real reason why Half-Life 2 has been delayed. Don't get me wrong - I'm in no big rush, and since I don't anticipate an "OS X" client in, well, never, it will have to wait until I finally bother to upgrade my home PC.

    But from what I've been seeing about Steam, I have the feeling that most of the delays have been figuring out how to make that system work right the first time so they don't have a "first day Ultima Online/Everquest/any other massive online game issue" out there.

    A good thing, and it's interesting to watch the baby steps they take to break it (like with this survey) then probably analyze what worked and what didn't.

  • Opt-out or opt-in? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by xTown ( 94562 ) on Thursday March 04, 2004 @05:54PM (#8468967)
    Is participation in this survey voluntary? I'm sure it's not; part of the Steam license probably says "we're going to gather data on you and you can't say boo about it." But I'd like to know for sure; I stopped playing HL when Steam came out.
    • Participation in the survey is voluntary.

    • Re:Opt-out or opt-in? (Score:5, Funny)

      by ctr2sprt ( 574731 ) on Thursday March 04, 2004 @08:28PM (#8470667)
      Did you read your own comment? "Is A true? I'm sure A is false. But I'm not sure. This in no way affects me."

      For what it's worth, participation is voluntary. So you were right to ask, wrong to be sure, right to be doubtful, and ultimately a waste of my time.

      • Hmmm...well, it was meant to convey my utter disdain for Valve and Steam. In completely dismissing the possibility that they could do something right by allowing opt-in, I wanted to communicate the fact that I believe that they can in fact do nothing right now (unless of course they abandon Steaming Pile of Crap).

        I think your summary of my post is overly superficial. I was asking a question to which I wanted to know the answer, and I had no way of knowing it other than asking. To summarize that as "But I'm
    • Yes, it is opt-in. After updating to this version, it asks you if you would like to participate in the survey.

      The Steam license is fairly short and succinct- I suggest you look at it if you are curious about their intentions.
    • Participation IS voluntary. The steam client asked me if I wanted to submit my information.
  • gentoo linux had a similar thing once, it would also show the most installed packages over time. but alas it has been dead for sometime...

  • What about ATI and Nvidia (Score:3, Insightful)

    by superpulpsicle ( 533373 ) on Thursday March 04, 2004 @06:17PM (#8469285)
    Forget Intel and AMD.

    I am curious to see who really has the bigger market share between ATI and Nvidia. They have way more influence on game libraries and graphics call than both processor company IMHO.
    • NVIDIA.

      Look at the part which shows the graphics driver DLL name.

      Also note that the GeForce4 MX is the most popular card, followed closely by the FX5200. This is probably because many OEMs use NVIDIA's low-end cards in their mid-range systems. Most gamers probably are smart enough to avoid onboard graphics.

  • Win 95 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rvw14 ( 733613 ) on Thursday March 04, 2004 @06:22PM (#8469360)
    Anyone find it interesting that 212 users are using windows 95?
  • I'd say these stats cover for the most part people who play Counterstrike and have broadband. I don't think that can be generalized to say they are FPS gamer stats. I play a lot of FPS games, but I'm on 56k so there's no way in hell I'm going to bother with Steam.

  • Steam Hammered (Score:3, Insightful)

    by sbryant ( 93075 ) on Thursday March 04, 2004 @06:51PM (#8469668)

    The survey is quite interesting, as are the stats as to how many servers and players are online etc. Average player minutes last month: 1.160 billion! I'm guessing that's a US billion, which is 1000 x 1million; a UK and German billion (probably other places too) is 1million x 1million. Anyway, I was surprised at the AMD/Intel CPU distribution (about half each).

    However, for all their ease of updates and cutting out middlemen for software retail etc, it sucks. As soon as an update like this comes out, everybody's steam client wants to update, the servers get overloaded and become effectively unavailable - I can't play online without updating, and I can't even play any of the steam games offline (offline play is part of this update). Must be hell for those with slower links.

    If it worth joining a system, where you can't use it for 3 days when a large update comes out? I think the basic idea is good, but the implementation sucks raw eggs! They don't even use the browser settings and go through a proxy - that would save a lot of bandwidth, and reduce their system load. You could go further with something like BitTorrent, even.

    -- Steve

    • FYI Valve was hit by a DoS attack this morning, which really knocked it out of any smooth running. That had a LOT to do with the issues related to the patch.

      Also, it just came out yesterday morning (about 36 hours after I posted this), so "3 days" is a bit of a stretch to say that's how long it was offline.
    • You could go further with something like BitTorrent...
      Considering Valve hired the writer of BitTorrent, I imagine they plan on adding something similar to BitTorrent into Steam. Not sure whats taking so long; seems like it would be a pretty easy addition, but it'll be nice when its there!
    • However, for all their ease of updates and cutting out middlemen for software retail etc, it sucks. As soon as an update like this comes out, everybody's steam client wants to update, the servers get overloaded and become effectively unavailable - I can't play online without updating, and I can't even play any of the steam games offline (offline play is part of this update). Must be hell for those with slower links.

      Sure, there were problems like this when steam first came out. That's because of one thing.

  • ntel (Score:2, Funny)

    by Ghost_3k ( 521943 )
    Processor Vendor
    GenuineIntel - 155,138 - 50.12 %
    ntel - 1 - 0.00 %

    "ntel"

    Intel bugs again...
    or someone running lin---s

  • Hyperthreading (Score:4, Insightful)

    by aSiTiC ( 519647 ) on Thursday March 04, 2004 @07:55PM (#8470338) Homepage
    I'm surprised to see approximately 41% of those surveyed have Hyperthreading enabled. From what I know there are not very many processors that support this feature. Also considering that Intel has about 50% of those surveyed this means there are only 9% of Intel CPUS survey without HT? A little unbelievable...
  • Don't forget people, Valve is gathering this data only from people using Steam. This is only a collection of data based on Steam users. This doesn't necessarily mean the people are playing any games (11 people playing with a processor speed below 200 Mhz? You're kidding me, I couldn't even play singleplay with my old 200 Mhz computer, let alone multiplayer.)

    This chart also seems to keep track of clients, not servers either. Only 123 computers running OS systems other than Windows? I think we all know Linux

    • Sorry, I used to run CS at 640x480 on a P233 with a Voodoo 2... it was more than adequate and I hardly changed the options... I played all through Half life with that original setup. In fact, in CS it handled smoke flawlessly, unlike many of the newer graphics cards. I don't know how many times I've heard people whinging that I use smoke on my own server.
  • How do you play a multiplayer online FPS at 96 pixels wide? What is that 1 player playing on? a cell phone?

    • Maybe someone ported wmquake [bensinclair.com] for Windows and HL... or maybe it gave them... er, ideas.

    • I bet it's the same guy who's running it at 50 bpp color depth - talk about extremities. And then there's one guy whose screen width is 9 pixels. I mean, even my mouse pointer is wider than that.
  • From the news [steampowered.com] page, "Yesterday's Update & Today's DDOS Attack" I thought they were possibly referring to a slashdotting. However, the times don't quite match up.
  • I got and filled out one of those surveys, informative but still a bit odd that it's reporting impossible figures, come on nobody is gonna play on a tiny screen with an awful processer.
  • Remember as you read these that this isn't the whole gamer market. This is a poll of people who play Counterstrike and Half-Life and all the other Half-Life mods.

    I play a lot of BF1942, and I can assure you that the computers running this game are far superior to the average shown here.

    Among my clan, ATi cards dominate the market, so does more than 512 MB ram, and so on.... I think AMD and Intel are still quite even, though.
  • Now had this been a piece of MS software, you'd all be saying how it's a violation of your privacy that they're taking this info. But it's Valve, and so you're all OK with that?


    Just pointing out the hypocrisy of it all.

  • The stats are very nice, but is it really usefull to have them be real-time? They could collect the data and then show it later in a resume. This way they wouldn't have overloaden once again their servers... I'm starting to ask myself if they actually know how much bandwidth and hardware they have at hand for this kind of operations? They continually keep on overloading them, and then they say that they are victim of a massive DDos...

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