Steam Hardware survey

barnsley

barnsley

born in a.....
So I've been following this for a while and I find it fascinating to see what the average pc that plays games is like. I always ignore the onboard graphics though. The 560ti has been the most popular 'card for a long time now.
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/?platform=pc

What do you guys think about the results? I thought AMD cards would've been a bit more popular to be honest.
 
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Regarding video cards the balance is about as I would expect.
The thing that gets me is that in the "Video Card Description" list I think I only counted 6 cards that will support Mantle.

Now I realise that Steam isn't the only way to play games on a PC, so the hardware survey may not represent the PC gaming community completely accurately. There's also the fact that not everyone may participate in the hardware survey.
However it does seem like a very small target audience for Mantle.
I don't know how much work writing a Mantle branch will take, but you have to wonder how many developers will go to the cost and effort of doing it to enhance the performance for such a small number of customers.
 
GoogalyMoogaly said:
Regarding video cards the balance is about as I would expect.
The thing that gets me is that in the "Video Card Description" list I think I only counted 6 cards that will support Mantle.

Now I realise that Steam isn't the only way to play games on a PC, so the hardware survey may not represent the PC gaming community completely accurately. There's also the fact that not everyone may participate in the hardware survey.
However it does seem like a very small target audience for Mantle.
I don't know how much work writing a Mantle branch will take, but you have to wonder how many developers will go to the cost and effort of doing it to enhance the performance for such a small number of customers.
Click to expand...

nobody but DICE gives a damn about mantle and they only do because they've been paid to do. as a lot of other people said before, it's not worth it. so i don't think it will be important in any way.
 
Basically Mantle is like Physx in terms of use. It'll be implemented in some games but it won't be really needed for any of them.
 
Mantle won't be used until later down the line.. many AAA devs just want to get the games out in time before holiday season and mantle would take too much time to implement on top of what has already been done.
 
I was surprised to still see so many HD5000 and GTX500 series cards, and they also claiming Dual Cores are the most popular with CPU count... would have thought quads or octas would be the gaming choice these days.
 
I imagine the post popular cpu would be an i3 followed -very- closely by the i5 and i7 quad cores. Quite alot of people game on laptops as well. AMD processors aren't used in the majority of prebuilts so that would be why they're not popular.
 
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I think a vast majority of gamers who also own non-gaming laptops will install Steam and thus skew the results.
 
I think they should redo this survey giving us the option of custom build or retail stock build or Laptop. That would at least give us some real results we can take on board. Bad show Steam :mad:
 
Wraithguard said:
I think they should redo this survey giving us the option of custom build or retail stock build or Laptop. That would at least give us some real results we can take on board. Bad show Steam :mad:
Click to expand...

you don't fill out any form, they just take it from the users so how are they supposed to know if it's a custom build or a prebuilt pc.
 
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Mantle is proof of concept, not really something which will become universal. It might, however, end up being copied in DirectX and OpenGL in a way which benefits both manufacturers.
 
The hardware survey usually just runs a scan on your pc to see what the hardware is and I'm not too sure how they'd be able to tell how your pc was made.
 
barnsley said:
The hardware survey usually just runs a scan on your pc to see what the hardware is and I'm not too sure how they'd be able to tell how your pc was made.
Click to expand...

You have to have agreed to allow steam to collect system data at some point, they could ask then what type of system we use.
 
I'd say the Steam hardware survey is probably a more accurate version of who's running what among PC gamers, given that I'd say that 99% of PC gamers who play games above the level of Flash games have Steam installed.
 
All I was merely saying is that maybe they could give us an Option (Laptop, Stock or Custom) when they ask us to do a hardware survey. It would help us greatly when viewing reports and give them clearer results. It just seems with the lists they've drawn up there's very mixed results right across all boards i.e. the top DX9 card in their list is the nVidia 6100 I wasn't even aware you could still buy these the last time I saw one it was AGP slot :huh:
 
SeekaX, it's the first question of the dialog which asks if you have a microphone etc.

Wraithguard, if they want such info they can get it from here. Prebuilt PCs have names like ASUSTeK Computer Inc under computer name. Laptops can be identified from chipset. :P
 
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