Survey Results

[Lemur]

I must confess, I pre-downloaded Bioshock on Steam. I hadn't made a pre-order at the local GameStop, and I just couldn't stomach dealing with them tomorrow. So yeah, I used Steam.

Anyway, the interesting bit is that they conducted a survey of my gear, mostly using auto-detect, and the results can be seen here.

Very interesting stuff. Seems like most gamers are using about a gig of RAM, and the uptake on SLI is low, low, low.

Give it a browse, see what you think. The majority of gamers seem to be milking their hardware much longer than the gaming press would make you think.

[Xiahou]

I think it was interesting that Vista still came in at less than 8% too. Hopefully, this will send a signal to any game developers who are thinking of going DX10 exclusive.

I'm also pleased that my "budget" PC is literally still ahead of the curve in almost all categories. Not surprised by low SLI adoption. IMO, it's really difficult to justify the cost of two cards against the actual performance gains it gets you.

But Steam, Lemur?

[Lemur]

Go ahead, kick me while I'm down.

[Husar]

I actually found it surprising that Vista is owned by more than 5% of players.

And some people seem to have very, very outdated systems while i was also surprised to see 8800 cards way up there in the graphicscard numbers, these things are expensive and like to eat energy.
Yes, they're also fast, but you pay for that in energy costs on top of the high sale price.

Anyway, we can also see that Germany and France are full of gamers and the high dutchness on the Org isn't justifiable by the amount of overall dutch gamers.

The only thing I don't get is how they got so many 16" displays, how they found out the inches of displays anyway and why they only have weird resolutions in the appropriate list. I guess 1280*1024 is listed under 1280*800 which is a widescreen resolution IIRC.

[sapi]

Yeah, there's some very interesting stuff in there

The two stats that jump out at me are the number of players with microphones (60%+) and with very little HDD space left

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

The RAM results surprised me a lot. I though 2 gigs was just about standard...

[drone]

25% are running dual-core. Hopefully this will help push game developers to actually program for multi-core environments.

[Stig]

Anyway, we can also see that Germany and France are full of gamers and the high dutchness on the Org isn't justifiable by the amount of overall dutch gamers.

Because we use the language English for games

The results also seem to explain the reasons of lag in TW MP, you can't play MP with 512 ram

[Husar]

Because we use the language English for games

It might just check for you Windows language.

[Stig]

It might just check for you Windows language.

I know many who use English as their Windows language as well
We Dutch had dubbing like you Jerries do with everything

[Husar]

I know many who use English as their Windows language as well
We Dutch had dubbing like you Jerries do with everything

There might still be some flag marking your Windows as a version sold in the Netherlands, otherwise making such a statistic would be rather useless. and looking at the overall populations of our countries, the statistics seem to fit very well.

That we dub everything just shows how important we are.

[The Spartan (Returns)]

Sad alot of peoples drivers arent updated.

[Stig]

Sad alot of peoples drivers arent updated.

I never updated mine, simply because I don't know how to. Well I know how to, but I don't understand the Nvidea website.
Loads of people don't even know it's possible.

[Husar]

Sad alot of peoples drivers arent updated.

You know, on one hand it can get on my nerves having to upgrade my drivers every few weeks, especially since you have to delete many files manually and on the lother hand new drivers don't always work better. I've installed newer drivers which resulted in a lot of bugs and made me go back to an older version which ran flawlessly. I also wonder why they have to adjust drivers for every second new game, I thought Direct 3D would standardize everything and make things compatible.

And then I wonder why people who can build complicated graphicscards are unable to write a proper upgrade routine into their driver installation programs. I installed the BioShock driver over the old NVidia driver just because I was lazy and wanted to, BioShock Demo crashes, all other games run fine, just like before.

Then again, you won't find me in any Steam statistic anyway.