Valve Hardware Survey
Thursday, September 27th, 2007 - 12:10pm
Valve has posted the results of an ongoing hardware survey it is conducting at http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html I thought the results were really interesting in that the average PC is a lot less powerful than reading lots of gaming news would have you think. For example, two-thirds of PCs in the survey are using less than a gig of RAM.
"All that time you waste dating and having sex could be better spent scouring the web for new game developer press releases." - Quintin_Stone
Wow, still less than 10% on Vista. That actually does surprise me as with DX10 stuff already out and the showpieces coming soon, I figured more would've made the jump.
"We're taught from a young age how to dodge rock hard objects moving at incredible rates of speed while simultaneously beating folks half to death with sticks. We do this for fun." -kung fu grip
http://blog.digital-lifeline.ca
Need to remove that . from the end of the link.
The results really aren't surprising. The source engine - though it now has some impressive features - supports three generations of DX and numerous iterations of hardware graphics archetecture.... It doesn't take much to run a source game so people with slower and older machines will be more likely to do so - instead of running games like crysis etc.
[edit] The other thing to note is that many of the surveyed components/drivers etc have a large margin of error - take the 14% of unknown brand of graphics cards for example...
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EGGmen - A European gaming blog *Episode 3 now live*
Eh, there isn't that much DX10 software out there. We're not even talking about native applications here. And none of the titles available so far, be it the patch for Company or Heroes or Lost Planet, really justify the purchase/switch so far. DX10 hasn't had its Rebel Assault yet, and with the way the PC market is going, plus it being a double investment (new GPU and new OS), it won't have an easy time flying off.
That apparently covers hardware such as the Radeon X2xxx series, which isn't listed by name in the survey. Probably a lot of old, crusty GPUs are included in that list as well. Hell, my old Voodoo 2 3000 would run Counterstrike.
Xbox Live: CrankyBaby
baggachipz: Who cares about Japan, let them have their silly pointless dog games and countless re-hashes of anime-based dragon princess super lucky crapitty crap.
interesting to see the amount of free space vs actual space on a HDD. We got too much crap on our computers!
Xfire: Pharacon
Tempest says: "A team hat doe snot communicate and talk to each other about what the next move will be is going to lose."
Mex is my hero = "f*ck it, I'll do it. WE'LL DO IT LIVE."
I feel sorry for the one guy with the "CyrixInstead" CPU. You chose... unwisely.
Pistols for two and coffee for one.
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arg i learned that WAY long time ago when i purchased a cyrix 166mhz p2 clone! SO FAST... not
Xfire: Pharacon
Tempest says: "A team hat doe snot communicate and talk to each other about what the next move will be is going to lose."
Mex is my hero = "f*ck it, I'll do it. WE'LL DO IT LIVE."
It's interesting to see how few users have Creative's Sound Blaster products like the Audigy, Audigy 2 or Xi-fi sound cards.
AC'97 onboard is the champ by a wide wide margin.
Xbox Live: Irongut | Playstation ID: Irongut_GWJ
I've had AC'97 onboard in my last two systems, and I honestly don't see a point in getting a dedicated board. To my tone-deaf ears, it's outstanding quality when mated up to a reasonably decent set of speakers. Speaking of, I run a set of the Logitech x-540s or something along those lines; they're a nice $100 5.1 system.
Coldstream wrote:
It amazes me that so many people have onboard sound, yet their Engine still has the sound slowdown issue with crappy drivers. You think they'd have that bulletproof after the 4 years or so that's been in the Engine.
"Poor Eli Nooo... *child starts crying*"
"Come on now, there's no need to make that kind of noise. It sounds awful and you'll upset other people." - Ionae from Spirit Engine 2
I have a little bit of issue with slowdown, but I'm pretty sure it's not a sound issue.
Coldstream wrote:
Kind of attached to my ATI Driver issues I had in another thread in the Tech section. Look at the ATI Driver versions being used. The top three are:
6.14.10.6698 ( 5 / 10 / 2007 ) 37,919 9.89 %
6.14.10.6683 ( 3 / 15 / 2007 ) 35,872 9.36 %
6.14.10.6614 ( 5 / 3 / 2006 ) 24,740 6.45 %
6.14.10.6660 ( 12 / 17 / 2006 ) 22,697 5.92 %
Notice they are all 6.14.10.66xx which goes to show all the drivers after this point are pretty bad and cause issues. Sure these are all beta drivers and they aren't really an official 6.14 ATI release driver (the last was 6.12 before going to 7.0).
Thank you DX10 and Vista. Microsoft have never learned and still attempts to push out poorly coded crap before they are ready. (pardon my Engrish for some reason my brain isn't working properly)
Prederick wrote:
"When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross." - Sinclair Lewis.
I'm currently using AC'97 and have no sound issues in TF2 or whatsoever.
Well there's also another explanation for this.
When i had my geforce 6800 card in my rig the valve system diagnostics thingy wouldn't detect the current drivers properly and was insisting i degraded my drivers to a really old version. The current drivers were displayed as an older number than they were supposed to be. It could be that there's a similar issue for ATI drivers too?
A blog: by me!
EGGmen - A European gaming blog *Episode 3 now live*
ATI has always had driver problems and I gave up on them over a year ago. I'm a little confused as what this would have to do with Vista. Microsoft game them plenty of time with the beta.
Xbox Gamertag: Armchair Jockey Steam: Armchair_Allstar
I used onboard audio with the last two systems I built. Just completed an upgrade and popped for the X-Fi card. I thought I was missing something.
Now the microphone won't work.
Back on topic...It's good to see that I'm not the only one not taking the plunge to Vista. But the urge to see DX10 in the Hellgate Beta and Bioshock is very tempting.
" And just as you have planted your seed in the ground, I am going to plant my seed, in you." - Dwight Schrute
ATI's Vista drivers were miles above NVIDIA's drivers when Vista launched and have had relatively few problems in comparison. NVIDIA's just now getting their drivers up to par and many features are still not available.
"We're taught from a young age how to dodge rock hard objects moving at incredible rates of speed while simultaneously beating folks half to death with sticks. We do this for fun." -kung fu grip
http://blog.digital-lifeline.ca
I'm a diehard Nvidia guy but I still think it's a shame ATI fell so far behind for so long by not getting the 2900's out. The numbers on there really show it too. Hopefully they catch up with whatever their next release is.
XBLive: Thin J
PSN: Thin_J
I don't imagine master craftsmen leaping away from completed projects and shouting "Done, motherf*ckers! - 1Dgaf
Canadian company, Canadian poster. I call Canadian marketing subterfuge!
"All that time you waste dating and having sex could be better spent scouring the web for new game developer press releases." - Quintin_Stone
I've got AC 97 and no sound issues on TF2, it's all the graphics card (Radeo 9800)
The man wears a bucket of KFC on his head. I wouldn't expect anything less. - Pred
Not Canadian anymore since AMD came along, bought out a profitable company and it proceeding to bleed them out. *grumble*
"We're taught from a young age how to dodge rock hard objects moving at incredible rates of speed while simultaneously beating folks half to death with sticks. We do this for fun." -kung fu grip
http://blog.digital-lifeline.ca
I have amd 3200+ with 1gb of ram and 6600 GT pcie, so I'm right in the middle of the bell curve, a little to the right on ram. However, I can already tell my system is showing it's age, and I'm not surprised I got in Nov 2005!
But it still plays WoW which is the only game I actually play besides a few demos here and there. So i feel no need to upgrade in the immediate future.
The next time I do upgrade though I will get windows Vista, hopefully by that time the most egregious flaws have been fixed. Some of the complaints about Vista are the exact same as when XP came out, hardware needs to catch up to Vista, and when I get 3 Gigs of Ram next time I think Vista will run fine. hah!
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Considering this thread is about hardware:
I have a 9600XT on a Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz with 1 of ram. It runs CounterStrike OKish, much better than a Macbook anyway.
Will TF2 be more or less the same?
I'm pretty sure the system memory readings are not exact. For instance, the people registering in the 512MB - 999MB category are most likely sporting 1GB. I'm not saying this because I don't think that many people have 512MB, but that it doesn't make sense that only 0.43% have 2GB or more. I think it's a similar issue to how windows reads actual memory space vs advertised space. Not sure why VALVe hasn't compensated for this yet.
Actual DX10 capable systems isn't determined by the Vista numbers, but by those with Vista and a DX10 card, a stat just below the OS one. Right now, only 2.31% of users can display DX10 graphics... and I imagine only three quarters of those could get decent enough performance to actually want to use DX10. In Company of Heroes, turning on DX10 can halve the FPS, and a lot of those users are using 8600 cards.
I would never get a dedicated sound card for improved sound quaility, but it does improve performance by offloading audio processing from the CPU. This can result in something like up to an 10% increase in FPS in some games.