New Steam survey results

I don't know. Like you probably, I've watched Macs with curiosity since they first showed up.

Why did we game on PCs in DOS with horrible configuration headaches when Macs could've ended the pain? During the '90s, some ports of PC games were superior because they'd run higher resolution than the DOS version. They came out later however.

I'm guessing the Mac culture is doesn't really include gaming much. Maybe it's all Apple's fault. Maybe they are just too niche, or perhaps they have a "educational / publishing" role attached to them and gaming just can't be included. Maybe it's the somewhat higher cost of entry and all gamers are too cheap? I don't really understand it. Hardware has never been a problem. Remember Doom3 first demoed on Mac GeForce3? And PowerPC was a nice chip during the Pentium years.

Not to say that I didn't play a ton of Oregon Trail and SimCity on Macs during school. :D
 
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No, of course i don't know either. :)
But i suppose it has something to do with Macs in the early nineties being very niche, quite expensive (IIRC) and, probably most important of all - running on another architecture than PCs. Only a few games crossed the gap and - as you said - were pretty late to boot.

Today, while still carrying a price premium, Macs can run virtually any PC game via Windows/Bootcamp and they're not half as much niche than before.
 
Oh crap. OS table isn't loading for me but from the main page's numbers here's were we are:

steam_os_1005.png


The inclusion of OSX obviously brought down all existing systems except the Other category. Windows 7 was the least affected by the change which means it continues to enjoy monthly growth, whereas XP's biggest drop means in light of the OSX inclusion, that it too continues to drop as per previous months.

In the graph above, OSX shows all three versions Valve is tracking (why Valve is showing patch-level versions for OSX is a bit of a mistery - think different?). 64-bit line includes OSX.

Just when I thought these numbers were starting to get dull...
 
It's nice to see that 64-bit OSes are catching up. If this continues, they should overtake their 32-bit counterparts within 4~6 months.
 
And developers might actually start generating 64bit binaries in 4-6 years
 
Malo said:
And developers might actually start generating 64bit binaries in 4-6 years
Click to expand...
That's less of a market thing than there has to be a reason to do it. So far few games use enough memory to make 64-bit matter and the other reasons (x64 registers, etc) rarely make a significant difference to performance in practice in my experience.

A few games have started pushing 2GB though so maybe we'll get the "perfect storm" of reasons.
 
There's been a few games that have pushed the 2 GB VA limit since mid 2000's, but the key word there is "few." What was frustrating was one of them was a MMO, so there was no way to enable large address aware in the .exe (for use with 64 bit os) since login file verification would always detect it and redownload the .exe. :p Took them almost a year to finally make the .exe (32 bit) large address aware on their end.

Encouraging to see 64 bit continuing it's slow but inexhorable rise.

Regards,
SB
 
Yeah MMO's are definitely one of the candidates for 64bit. Even WoW can eventually eat up 2Gb of RAM going back and forth from Dalaran all the time and eventually just crashes out.
 
The Steam Hardware Survey site has been revamped.

Not only that, we finally have updated "PC Video card usage by mfg" statistics. After months of 61.88 : 30.92 (Nvidia : ATI), we now have 59.11 : 32.98.
 
Am I the only one that cannot get the Mac results to *blep* of?
I have no interest in Mac "gaming" hardware and to be frank, I'd rather have stats for Win9x than OSX...
 
Why did we game on PCs in DOS with horrible configuration headaches when Macs could've ended the pain? During the '90s, some ports of PC games were superior because they'd run higher resolution than the DOS version. They came out later however.
Click to expand...
Coming to a PC Games sub-forum near you realsoonnow™: Windows Gaming is Dead, Long Live Mac Gaming!
 
Totally missed that quote about gaming on Mac instead of DOS. Apple had a hand in that somewhat. They heavily discouraged game developement on the Mac prefering to have developers make games for the Apple ][ series. The Macs were brought out as professional and home office machines. Also why it was a long long time until they dropped black and white displays for color displays.

In other words, it was Apple's computer for "adults."

PC just happened to have a large install base coupled with remarkably low pirating for such a large install base at the time. If anyone remembers BBSes and CUGs back in those days, Amiga was by far the most pirated system followed by Apple a very distant 2nd and PC's after that.

Apple then discontinued the Apple ][ series and still didn't rush out to court game developers. PC meanwhile was going through a bit of a revolution with all the clones and DIY (helped by Computer Shopper leading the way for Mail Order cheap PC parts) making it a cheap platform both to develope and game on. Amiga meawhile was in the process of dying, although it lingered on for quite a few years in Europe.

Then 1995 came and MS released Windows 95 which completely and totally revolutionized not only home computing but eventually computer gaming.

Apple during that time basically twiddled their thumbs. By the time Jobs came back and gave Apple a focused direction, DirectX on PC was fully mature and computer gaming was firmly entrenched in Windows.

Regards,
SB
 
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Being black and white vs colour itself also kind of makes a big difference for game devs choosing which platform.
 
Malo said:
Nice summary there SB :)
Click to expand...

yep but don't forget the blame OpenGL shares too.., once the near defacto API it's fallen out in favor of proprietary software. Sure some could blame MS but really the one with the biggest blame should be aimed right at OpenGL for failing to take the lead but instead stall out for some key years.. only just recently has it begun to even start to "catch up". It's only last remaining strong hold remains in non gaming apps and the last bastions of *nix gamers.
 
fbuffer said:
yep but don't forget the blame OpenGL shares too.., once the near defacto API it's fallen out in favor of proprietary software. Sure some could blame MS but really the one with the biggest blame should be aimed right at OpenGL for failing to take the lead but instead stall out for some key years.. only just recently has it begun to even start to "catch up". It's only last remaining strong hold remains in non gaming apps and the last bastions of *nix gamers.
Click to expand...

What about Steam on the Mac now? Isn't that all OpenGL?
 
4800's gaining again this month.
GTX4x0 Parts still haven't passed the GTX295 numbers so they don't show on the overall chart. (i.e. less than 0.5%)
 
GTX480 went up 0.20% and 470 up 0.26% for DX10/11 systems.

5800 series up 0.54% and 5700 series up 0.70% for DX10/11 systems.
 
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