A Look at Steam's Hardware Survey for July 2012

You might recall that a few months ago, we planned to begin taking a look at hardware statistics that Valve updates each month. Not long after, the company up-ended all of its previous results due to inaccuracies caused by certain bugs. The most up-to-date hardware survey does put us back on the right track, however, so now is a great time to take a look at things again from a fresh perspective.

Starting from the top, NVIDIA holds the #1 spot for GPU usage, snagging 46.52%, while AMD settles for second with 35.53%. Since February 2011, Intel's usage has seen a dramatic rise, currently sitting at 11.61%. The most popular GPU at the moment? Where DX 11 OS + GPU is concerned, that's NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 560 Ti, with 2.99% (granted, small, but there are a ton of configurations here). Second place is NVIDIA's GTX 460, at 2.13%, while third is AMD's Radeon HD 5770 at 2.00%. Given the massive number of DX11 GPUs available, the majority of the results in this category sit under 1%.

It should come as a surprise to no one that Intel dominates the CPU side of things, commanding a 72.19% marketshare; AMD holds the other 27.81%. Of all these CPUs, 38.70% of users are equipped with a quad-core, while 49.64% have a dual-core. Interestingly, 2.5% have at least a six-core, a figure I admit is a bit higher than I would have expected.

One figure that might strike you is that the majority of people on Steam are equipped with 5GB+ of RAM, at 32.83%. Another 40% is shared between 3GB and 4GB configurations. For storage space, the most popular setup ranges from 250-499GB, at 35.42%. 19.99% have more than 1TB. Unfortunately, Valve doesn't seem too intent on fine-tuning these values even more, since by today's standards, 1TB is rather modest. It'd really be interesting to see true values.

As I mentioned in our last post, one of the results that impressed me most was that the majority of Steam gamers use a 1080p resolution, a definite sweet spot. Currently, 29.11% have that, while 18.97% have 1366x768 (thanks to notebooks, I'm sure), and 10.48% have 1280x1024. The remaining % points are spanned across every other resolution imaginable.

Wrapping things up, where do OSes stand? No surprise, Windows 7 x64 is the most popular, with a 58.13% share, while the 32-bit variant holds 15.26%. Windows XP usage is beginning to verge on nonexistence, as both 32-bit and 64-bit versions hold just about 15% (what a stark contrast to two years ago!). Another 11% are still sticking by Vista's side.

For even more stats, be sure to check out the latest update on the Steam site, and as a friendly reminder, don't forgot to join our Steam group while there!