Valve Releases Recent Hardware Survey Results

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."

Re:GenuineTMx86

[east coast]

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.

Only in America

[Winckle]

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!

Re:Video Driver update needed

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep in mind that many of these people are probably using laptops. More often that not, OEM's do not provide fully up to date graphics drivers for laptops and official drivers from Nvidia/ATI won't install on older laptops.

(Slightly off-topic, but now that Apple supports Windows on their notebooks through Boot Camp and provides a set of drivers which they update somewhat often, I wonder if perhaps Apple will maintain constantly up to date notebook graphics drivers for Windows. It would be rather ironic if Apple became the best vendor for Windows laptops for gamers outside of high end niche vendors like Alienware)

Re:No need for email

[transmetal]

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 [gamesindustry.biz]

Re:DVD!

[ddillman]

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.

Re:Good insight

[illumin8]

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.