New Steam survey results

Ah, OK. So it's essentially unchanged since like 2007? I thought you meant a new query mechanism has been added recently. :)

So I suppose this means Steam was using some really ancient detection mechanism? Because I have never heard of any other mechanism than that atimgpud.dll library.
 
Crossfire detection works by checking the user's bank account to see if it has > 100,000 USD.
 
This hasn't been revisited for awhile but they now show DX11 along with DX10 systems. According to the June-Nov results, 52% DX10 and 30.5% DX11. That's pretty impressive DX11 figures and given compatibility with DX10 features automatically, further reasoning to completely move away from DX9.
 
Something interesting...

On the Mac side it seems notebook computers have reached saturation and there is a growth in desktop marketshare compared to a decline in notebook marketshare over the past 18 months. I'm wondering if this is due to people feeling that they no longer need a notebook for on the go media with the advent of the iPad and thus are replacing their notebooks with iMacs.

Looks like the deathknell for Desktop computers will be delayed indefinitely yet again, at least in the Mac space.

Other notable things. Quad CPU's continue to gain share. Moveent to 5+ GB of memory seems to be accelerating.

Head scratchers. Over half of existing XP users have DX10/11 GPUs. 19% of systems are still XP 32/64 based. I expect there to still be significant investment in targetting Dx9 for many devs until this drops below 10%. But hopefully, there will be more focus on DX10/11 paths in the future.

The "I wish this trend would accelerate" trend. 32 bit systems only lost about 1.25% marketshare. :( I wish 32 bit would die or at least speed up it's eventual death already so that developers could fully embrace 64 bit executables.

One last interesting thing. Russian is the 2nd fastest growing language for computers. :D

Regards,
SB
 
At least the developers can see that the only thing required for another 10% of users for DX10+ is an OS upgrade instead of full hardware replacement.
 
Eh, many (most?) of those non DX10 capable machines wouldn't be able to run modern games in the first place. Even console ports. I don't see any reason to stick with DX9 at all.
 
AMD owns some 58% of the DX11 market, even after the massive amount of design wins for nVidia's GT5xxM in Sandybridge laptops.

And more than 2 years after its release, Juniper is still the most used DX11 card.

The "lifetime" award obviously goes to G92 (some Geforce 8800, 9800, GTS150) which appears to be in some 10% of all gaming computers. Well, maybe the fact that nVidia rehashed it for 2 and a half years throughout 4 families of graphics cards helped a bit, lol.

BTW, it's a shame that the survey doesn't distinguish Geforce models between families for the 8 and 9 series. The "8800" series have something like 7 different configurations, with substantially different performance points.



But the one thing that truly shocks me is the little amount of laptop graphics cards there are. I count only some 5% of laptop graphics cards in there.
Only one every 20 steam players are using laptops to play games?! That can't be right, in a group of friend gamers I know (let's say, some 20 people), only me and other 2 guys use desktops to play games.
 
Alexko said:
Maybe Steam doesn't detect mobile graphics card very well.
Click to expand...

Must be sample variance because in my friends group no one uses a laptop to game (profesionally, it's a different thing.)
 
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ToTTenTranz said:
But the one thing that truly shocks me is the little amount of laptop graphics cards there are. I count only some 5% of laptop graphics cards in there.
Only one every 20 steam players are using laptops to play games?! That can't be right, in a group of friend gamers I know (let's say, some 20 people), only me and other 2 guys use desktops to play games.
Click to expand...

Interesting, all of my friends are using desktops to play games, even those having laptops.
Pretty much shows we can't trust our own experience to deduce a global trend.
 
Rodéric said:
Interesting, all of my friends are using desktops to play games, even those having laptops.
Pretty much shows we can't trust our own experience to deduce a global trend.
Click to expand...


Whatever the actual proportion is, I don't think it's even remotely possible that only 5% of the PC gamers using Steam are using laptops.
I studied and now I work at an engineering faculty. It's probably one of the places where you'd find the most people geek enough to build their own desktops (or ask friends to do so for them).
The amount of people I know of that plays games on desktops is really scarce, nowadays.

It makes sense, if you think about it. Due to most games being ports of 6 year-old consoles, pretty much anything can be decently played with a HD4670M/GT420M and up.
And any +500€ laptop can do that nowadays.

"Low-standards" PC players (the majority?) actually don't save much money or gain that much performance into going desktop.




What I think it might be happening is that the GPU naming in laptops has become so fragmented that all of those GPUs are going into the "others" group (25%) for having low share.
For example, nVidia launched no less than 40 different laptop graphics cards since 2008 -> and that's without counting the higher-end models with more than 35W TDP.
AMD has also launched around 40 different models of laptop graphics cards only between the HD5000M and HD6000M series. There are 12 different desktop HD6000 cards and 22 different HD6000M discrete GPUs.
 
Rodéric said:
Interesting, all of my friends are using desktops to play games, even those having laptops.
Pretty much shows we can't trust our own experience to deduce a global trend.
Click to expand...

Same here, out of about 175-200 friends and aquaintances (MMO's, Steam, and RL), only about 5 or so use laptops to game. And one of those has just ordered a desktop because he was unsatisified with the gaming experience on his laptop. Although some do have a gaming capable laptop. Know a few couples and families with multiple gaming capable desktops and 1 gaming capable laptop.

I have a feeling laptop gaming is more prevalent in universities or with those who have just graduated from HS/university. They are also somewhat popular with unmarried men in the military as barracks usually have limited space. Maybe it's more popular in Europe as well as I keep hearing about how little space people have over there (Kinect complaining from many Europeans about space issues).

Either way I have been noticing a bit of a trend away from notebooks and laptops with more people going with desktop for the home and a smartphone or tablet for on the go media instead of a notebook.

Regards,
SB
 
I imagine there's a fairly even split of desktops and laptops, just judging by the load times in games where you have to wait for everyone to load up :D There are still things that laptops are noticably slower at :S

That said, I don't think the Steam stats can tell us much about that. Personally I game almost exclusively on a desktop (why not? There's no reason to use a laptop if you have a good desktop too), but I still install steam on all of my several laptops and devices to put on simpler time-wasters like Defense Grid. Thus I fully admit to skewing the stats in a non-representative way towards laptop hardware ;)

I'd be interested in seeing the graph weighted against play time, assuming they can collect those stats (all the infrastructure is in place). That's a lot more interesting and representative than "how many computers" have what hardware. Even weighting it against $ of game purchases per year or something would be more interesting (especially to developers).

But yeah I sort of agree with the trend... nothing really has come along to replace a good desktop. It's more the laptop form factor that is starting to get a bit more squeezed. A lot of what I used to do on my laptop I can go acceptably well on my phone or tablet now, and those are both easier to carry around. Ultrabooks might provide a bit more interesting competition for tablets though, as sometimes you really do need a keyboard. I'm interested in seeing if someone does an "ultrabook"-style tablet/slate with touch support and all the tablet goodies + a keyboard. That'd be quite a compelling device if it could be made small enough.
 
My tablet has a USB port on it, so I can hook up a keyboard and mouse anytime I want if I need it. I also repurposed a Picture frame stand to use as a "tablet" stand when using it with a keyboard and mouse. I generally don't need it, but there are those rare occasions when I don't feel like using handwriting to input text.

Regards,
SB
 
Isn't the Acer W500 pretty much exactly that? Tablet with touch + keyboard?
 
Yup that's the sort of design that I mean. For my tablet (Samsung Series 7 Slate = awesome) I have a bluetooth keyboard and mouse and the case for the keyboard acts as a stand - which is quite usable. That said, something like the Acer W500 or Asus's slider thingy (forget the name) is in the right ballpark IMHO (want a stylus, many-finger multitouch and few other things too).
 
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A toutchpad would be horrible for games and you'd be surprised how many people dont know you can plug in a mouse
I even knew people who never knew you could connect a pc to a tv

filthy console gaming peasant : "but I prefer to play games on the big screen
member of the Glorious P.C Gaming Master Race (aka me) : "well then just connect your pc to the tv"
filthy console gaming peasant : "you can do that!!!"
 
In one of Estonian biggest forums there is a very active thread about console vs PC gaming. It's amazing how big the correlation is between being a console gamer + being clueless without half-decent capacity for reasoning :)
 
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