Gaming hardware market shifts
The Survey
The Steam hardware survey is something that all users are invited to do when loading one of the steampowered games, such as Counter Strike: Source, allowing them to gather key hardware demographics and the like. Fortunately all the results are then published online allowing for the public to see how things are looking.
The Demographic
It's all gamers and that's what makes this interesting... As mentioned above AMD were the chip of choice for gamers 2003-2006 but it looks like Intel have really dented the market with their amazing new line up.
The Processors
A 49.22% / 50.77% split in favour of Intel. Intel are now the majority in gaming PC's according to this Steam survey (from just under a million submissions).
Graphics cards
Always a difficult decision in my mind, apparently not for everyone else. The Nvidia driver was used 54.33% of the time compared to the 37.96% of the ATi - giving a reasonable indication to which manufacturer is a gamers favourite. This has to be down to the performance/price ratio of the Nvidia 6600GT.
Although, the graphics card survey shows some real relics, with the 6600 being top, followed by the FX5200! Behind that is the ATi 9600! I mean seriously, these cards (besides the 6600) are seriously old. Unsurprisingly the Nvidia 6800 is placed 4th most popular which is a sensible placement for a mid-range card with SM3.0.
I wanted to believe Nvidia's dominance was because of the 7800 series of cards but that doesn't appear to be the case, it's the FX5200 and the 6600 that won the war. Even I, as a happy ATi X850XT owner sometimes wish I had chosen the 6800 for the SM3.0 benefit.
How you compare
As a keen Counter Strike: Source player and occasional gamer, my machine is reasonably well stacked for a number of tasks. 2gb of RAM puts me into the top 0.06% it seems for which I'm proud and I'm sure my 940gb of hard drive space would push me somewhere towards the top of the storage list too. To feel overly proud in this survey you need a serious gaming machine, something I sadly don't have. I have mid-range componants due to a modest (cough *low* cough) bank balance.
Have a look yourself
Have a browse at the results - it makes interesting reading. If you want to play Counter Strike, drop me an email and I'm sure we could organise a bit of a match.
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