New Steam survey results

January's results are in. Vista aggregate took a 2.8% hit, XP continues its steady decline and Win7 climbed around 5.5% with 64-bit alone gaining ~4%. All of 64-bit now has 30% share, a quick and dirty (and wrong) prediction for share control would be in one year's time.

steam_os_1001.png
 
Whoa some really interesting results.

After months of steady decline, 1 CPU systems had a sudden large jump. Atom perhaps being able to overcome the overall decline of 1 CPU on desktops? That doesn't exactly make sense either as Atom has been out a while.

AMD CPU's continue a slow decline in share.

Win7 64 bit now higher share than Vista 32 bit. :D I'll root for Richard's predition of 64 bit being the majority in one year. :D

57xx series see's a rather large +0.79% initial showing. Followed closely by various 4xxx and 58xx (+0.38) series.

Most Nvidia lines showing drops in share. 8800 series finally showing its first drop and a big one.

Still no Dx11 breakdown. Booo. :D Maybe we'll see that when the other company joins the party. :)

Regards,
SB
 
Why do some of the results go up and down? Is there some variability in steam which explains how they can get different results monthly with the same pool of people?
 
Squilliam said:
Why do some of the results go up and down? Is there some variability in steam which explains how they can get different results monthly with the same pool of people?
Click to expand...

Its a sampling of the active userbase as such, some month to month variation is expected as people come and go which is part of the sampling error with any sample group. The trends are what is generally interesting and pretty much statistically absolute.
 
aaronspink said:
Its a sampling of the active userbase as such, some month to month variation is expected as people come and go which is part of the sampling error with any sample group. The trends are what is generally interesting and pretty much statistically absolute.
Click to expand...

Thanks, good explanation.
 
Silent_Buddha said:
After months of steady decline, 1 CPU systems had a sudden large jump. Atom perhaps being able to overcome the overall decline of 1 CPU on desktops? That doesn't exactly make sense either as Atom has been out a while.
Click to expand...
Some of that might also be related to the games being purchased and played. Torchlight was popular over Christmas and they had lots of sales of it in Jan as well - this has a "Netbook" mode...
 
The number of DX10 systems (Vista/W7 + DX10 GPU) is really marching ahead and at 48.94% already it hopefully means that DX9 support can finally be dropped in more titles or at least become the secondary focus.
 
brain_stew said:
The number of DX10 systems (Vista/W7 + DX10 GPU) is really marching ahead and at 48.94% already it hopefully means that DX9 support can finally be dropped in more titles or at least become the secondary focus.
Click to expand...

I'm hoping thats the case towards the end of the year where we see some titles as dx 10/11 only and it expands into 2011.

With dx 11 igps coming in the near future and nvidia finally getting a dx 11 part out there. It will just start to snowball.
 
eastmen said:
I'm hoping thats the case towards the end of the year where we see some titles as dx 10/11 only and it expands into 2011.

With dx 11 igps coming in the near future and nvidia finally getting a dx 11 part out there. It will just start to snowball.
Click to expand...

Do you know when the DX11 IGPs are coming / and if they will be any good? Assuming the DX11 IGP from AMD for example implements the same DX11 architecture scaled down, as the desktop/mobile parts, will that help or hinder the performance of the part?
 
Squilliam said:
Do you know when the DX11 IGPs are coming / and if they will be any good? Assuming the DX11 IGP from AMD for example implements the same DX11 architecture scaled down, as the desktop/mobile parts, will that help or hinder the performance of the part?
Click to expand...

ati's should come qtr 1 . I'm sure the 5200 will be weak and not a good gaming setup. But since they use the same tesselator in all their chips the 5450 and up should be quite fast for mobile parts.

what should really push dx 11 foward is fusion. Apparently that will be a 5650 part which is quite fast considering its built into the cpu
 
eastmen said:
ati's should come qtr 1 . I'm sure the 5200 will be weak and not a good gaming setup. But since they use the same tesselator in all their chips the 5450 and up should be quite fast for mobile parts.

what should really push dx 11 foward is fusion. Apparently that will be a 5650 part which is quite fast considering its built into the cpu
Click to expand...

Fusion will likely kill most of the market below the 56xx level. However it does represent a very good floor for developers on the PC to target as their minimum requirements so long as they can get good adoption and get the proportion of AMD CPUs up around 33%.
 
Squilliam said:
Fusion will likely kill most of the market below the 56xx level. However it does represent a very good floor for developers on the PC to target as their minimum requirements so long as they can get good adoption and get the proportion of AMD CPUs up around 33%.
Click to expand...

It might on AMD platforms but 54xx level hardware (and future variants for that market segment) would still be a nice alternative to Intel's integrated. Especially when you take into account the historically...how shall we say...underperforming drivers Intel usually has for their integrated.

Likewise as upgrades for older machines.

Regards,
SB
 
Silent_Buddha said:
It might on AMD platforms but 54xx level hardware (and future variants for that market segment) would still be a nice alternative to Intel's integrated. Especially when you take into account the historically...how shall we say...underperforming drivers Intel usually has for their integrated.

Likewise as upgrades for older machines.

Regards,
SB
Click to expand...

But what exactly are the roles of the lower end add-in boards? Once you take away their media decoding role with Intel on die/package graphics hardware, all thats left for them to do is light game accelleration. However the IGP within the CPU die/package can be clocked higher so therefore theres less of a margin between it and a lower end add in board.

Im not talking about a complete destruction of the low end market over-night, but the trends are for the capabilities of these low end cards to be obsorbed into the CPU, say over the next 5 years or so.
 
At some point yea. The sub 5650 cards will loose their market but they will just exist inside the cpu from now on. There will still be a market for faster gpus in laptops. But if we know every 12-18 months ati can put in its newest gen $80 part inside the cpu it will be alot better now where we hve 3200s and 4200s that are lucky to play 3 year old games decently.
 
Squilliam said:
But what exactly are the roles of the lower end add-in boards? Once you take away their media decoding role with Intel on die/package graphics hardware, all thats left for them to do is light game accelleration. However the IGP within the CPU die/package can be clocked higher so therefore theres less of a margin between it and a lower end add in board.

Im not talking about a complete destruction of the low end market over-night, but the trends are for the capabilities of these low end cards to be obsorbed into the CPU, say over the next 5 years or so.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure I'd say that. Intel only just now caught up to AMD's integrated graphics solution. There will always be a market for even budget video upgrades. If for nothing else than popcap style games.

An budget card may not be able to play a Dx11 title like AvP or Dirt 2 perhaps, but then if you are after those types of games you aren't looking at the budget cards anyways.

And at some point when the majority of video cards support Dx11, even popcap styles games will migrate, just like budget games eventually migrated from Dx8 to Dx9.

So someone buys a new Clarksdale with on package GPU and in a year or two maybe wants to upgrade. And while the on package GPU has caught up to AMD's integrated in speed, it's still lacking the HTPC features that the 5xxx series will have. For example, I don't think it has bitstreaming.

The market may shrink, but I don't see it becoming a non-factor in the forseeable future.

Regards,
SB
 
Silent_Buddha said:
The market may shrink, but I don't see it becoming a non-factor in the forseeable future.

Regards,
SB
Click to expand...

Oh yes. I think we agree here. Thats also another way I would put it, I just believe we look at it from different angles, you've got a HTPC right?
 
Squilliam said:
Oh yes. I think we agree here. Thats also another way I would put it, I just believe we look at it from different angles, you've got a HTPC right?
Click to expand...

Yeah. :) I used to use a hacked Xbox with XBMC for a media center. That got me hooked and I wanted something with more features (record and transcode for example, and no memory limitation for MAME), which then got me into HTPCs.

So I've got a hybrid HTPC/file and backup server.

I briefly considered upgrading the machine to Clarksdale since the on package GPU was improved with regards to HTPC duties, but it lacked many features that the 5450 will bring to the table. Plus Intel driver support is always a bit of a concern for me.

Regards,
SB
 
Silent_Buddha said:
Yeah. :) I used to use a hacked Xbox with XBMC for a media center. That got me hooked and I wanted something with more features (record and transcode for example, and no memory limitation for MAME), which then got me into HTPCs.

So I've got a hybrid HTPC/file and backup server.

I briefly considered upgrading the machine to Clarksdale since the on package GPU was improved with regards to HTPC duties, but it lacked many features that the 5450 will bring to the table. Plus Intel driver support is always a bit of a concern for me.

Regards,
SB
Click to expand...

I had thought of making a home media server but I just don't think its appropriate in my case as I have Sky TV and I doubt that it would be compatible with the PC in terms of recording. I could set the Sky to change over at the right time, but its quite a lot of hassle.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top