Mine’s bigger than yours

People familiar with Steam have probably in the past taken part in one of their hardware surveys or are certainly aware of them. These surveys basically gather information on the system it’s running on and submits it to Valve. Valve in turn actually makes use of this information. They take it into account when developing their latest and greatest games and tools. So good on you if you’re one of the people taking part!

Now, once again, they’ve released the results of their latest survey. And the numbers tell a very interesting story indeed.

In the graphics department, nVidia is leading the masses with 62% ( approx. 1,086,597 ) of the 1.7 million people participating in the survey. AMD / ATI sits at a mere 30%. Less than half. Which means, for every two ATI user, there’s two nVidia users. But it’s ok, we like the odds stacked against us (can you tell I’m an ATI fan ?). But I fully understand why the numbers show these results. nVidia has in the past few months released one after the other kick-ass piece of hardware at reasonable prices. Especially the 8800 series of cards (which in the survey proved to be the most popular nVidia cards in use). The only answer ATI could muster, was the recently released HD 3870 X2. But once again it has arrived a bit too late. The same as with their HD 2900 XT cards. And with nVidia on the brink of releasing their latest cards that includ PhysX chips to the public, ATI will have to pull the proverbial rabbit out of the hat to survive the next onslaught. But overall, the figures show that at least two-thirds of the gaming population are savvy enough to stay with the better bet at this stage.

Worth mentioning at this point, is what about the unaccounted for 8% ? Are those people still using software rendering ?? If that’s the case, I have to submit that I’d be quite surprised!

In the CPU camp, things aren’t looking any better for AMD. With intel leading by 58% vs AMD’s 41%. Also an interesting note, is that only 36% of all the cpu’s are dual core and 4% are quad-core. Which means 60% of all gamers (contributing to the survey) are still running single-core cpu’s ?? To me, that’s a bit shocking. As the article mentions, it’s hard to get by without a multi-core cpu nowadays. Also, with quad-core not really being proven as of yet, the 4% is an expected amount of quad-core users. But what I suspect will be the case in the near future as games become more and more cpu intensive and get coded for multi-cpu support, that all those single-core users will probably move to quad-core. They’re probably the ones checking out the playing field before making their move.

In the DirectX camp, I’m not all that surprised to see that 80% of all the users are still sticking to XP. With only 9% of the users running Windows Vista with a DirectX-10 capable graphics card. It’s no secret that, when Microsoft released Windows Vista, they did not get any of the popularity lucky-packets that were making the rounds. Currently I’m dual-booting between Windows XP and Vista, and 98% of my time is spent using XP. I’ve only used Vista to play Bioshock and Assassin’s Creed on DX10. But having said that, I don’t have any gripes with Vista. If you have a decent rig (at least a high end dual-core or quad-core cpu with lots of jiggerbytes of ram), I’ve found that Vista is much faster than XP. Given, I haven’t experienced it on a low-end system yet, but having experienced it on a decent PC, I’m pretty much convinced Vista wasn’t developed for slow machines in mind. Still, there are a lot of development companies (Valve and id being big names among them) that don’t really care much for DirectX 10. Less so for DirectX 10.1. Which will make it interesting to see where it all leads in the future. Specially with id utilizing OpenGL and not DirectX, yet achieving the same level of graphical detail in their engines.

Studying game development at the moment, I’m delving into every aspect of game development that I can, and what I recently ran across, was a proper book about game development on Linux. Personally I’ve found, I actually prefer game development using Linux. But being a Linux user might be influencing my views regarding this, so I’d rather not elaborate on my thoughts for fear of it becoming one-sided. But something worth mentioning, is ASUS‘ decision to embed a lightweight version of Linux on their P5Q line of motherboards with the idea of extending it to all of their motherboards in the future. This will throw a nice sized spanner into the works and I think it might just have an interesting effect on the future of the Linux vs Windows “war”.

Getting back to the Steam survey, the figures show that 64% of players have microphones. That’s 1,127,369 users. One million, one hundred thousand…… What I think would have been exceptionally interesting to see, though, is what percentage of that 1.1m players are actually older than 13. The amount of noise garbage one is barraged with on some of the servers (Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, you name it) because of young “kiddies” abusing their mics, is cataclysmic. Yes, there’s a mute option, but sometimes it’s actually important to hear what teammates are saying. And some part of playing online is actually interacting with international / local players in a semi-social environment. So having to mute people just makes it an unpleasant experience for everybody. Which is why I think, there should be age rules on some servers. If you’re older than 15, you’re allowed to use your mic. If not, then the game won’t allow you to. Of course, you still get the older dipshits who abuse their mics as well. Singing and talking about “this awesome strat they used the other night”, but at least it will be a bit more manageable.

In closing, it looks like AMD / ATI is losing a lot of ground when it comes to the hardware war. Either they have no answer to give to Intel and nVidia, or they’re secretly working on some incredible technology that’s going to blow everybody’s minds when they release it. Who knows, maybe in the near future Intel or nVidia might acquire AMD ?? Which would mean some standardization in terms of hardware at last!! Something that should have happened at least a few years ago.

But that’s a story for another post.