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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!
