Steam Hardware & Software Survey: June 2012

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Valve has released its Steam Hardware & Software Survey for June 2012. The company also took the opportunity to explain a bug found in Steam's survey code that skewed the results of the survey. Here a copy of the main chart for those of you that can't view the Steam site from work, etc.:

There was a bug introduced into Steam's survey code several months ago that caused a bias toward older systems. Specifically, only systems that had run the survey prior to the introduction of the bug would be asked to run the survey again. This caused brand new systems to never run the survey. In March 2012, we caught the bug, causing the survey to be run on a large number of new computers, thus giving us a more accurate survey and causing some of the numbers to vary more than they normally would month-to-month. Some of the most interesting changes revealed by this correction were the increased OS share of Windows 7 (as Vista fell below XP), the rise of Intel as a graphics provider and the overall diversification of Steam worldwide (as seen in the increase of non-English language usage, particularly Russian).
 
Thanks for providing the screenshot through [H] since Steam is blocked from work.
 
Am I the only one disturbed by the fact that Steam is scanning people's HD's to see what other apps are installed?
 
I'm a little surprised at how many triple-monitor setups there are but I guess this is old news since it is actually down slightly.

I only have one friend with 3 monitors, I guess I need geekier friends.
 
I find it hard to give a shit. There's nothing nefarious behind it.

People are overly paranoid and over-protective of their privacy.

Again, there isn't anything nefarious or devious about Steam doing an annual survey of your hardware and commonly used programs. They aren't Google or other companies that sell your information to other companies. This isn't your Social Security Number, phone number, address, date of birth, place of work, your significant other, your or children, your mistress-every-Saturday who works in the mailroom with the skimpy outfit, or other private information.

Marketing wouldn't be effective in selling a product or target a specific market or demographic if surveys weren't done, whether directly or indirectly.

No marketing, no products sold.

No products sold, no business thrives.

Throw that tinfoil hat away.
 
More people use uTorrent than winamp and teamspeak. 29.4%
 
Am I the only one disturbed by the fact that Steam is scanning people's HD's to see what other apps are installed?

Probably doesnt need to scan the entire hard drive. Could look at your registry which could provide that info.
 
Acording to the results on 12% of people are using a DX10/11 GPU with XP (and i'm willing to bet most of those are 8800/9800's)... can we drop that relic of an OS now?
 
They need to expand their charts a bit. A computer with more than 1TB of hard drive space and 5+ GBs of RAM is hardly unusual anymore.
 
I love how 40% of the steam user base has some form of torrent software. :D

That just means there are a lot of Steam users who have an interest in sharing Linux ISOs and other Open Source software programs and applications.
 
Probably doesnt need to scan the entire hard drive. Could look at your registry which could provide that info.

Probably looks at the Windows Programs/Features dealio, rather than doing any active scanning for executables.

I doubt triple head, or any multi monitor stats are accurate. Steam thinks my 5292*1050 triple head array is a single monitor.
 
Acording to the results on 12% of people are using a DX10/11 GPU with XP (and i'm willing to bet most of those are 8800/9800's)... can we drop that relic of an OS now?

Yea makes no sense to support XP on graphical games. Only 15% of gamers use it. And of the ~75% on Vista and 7, 3/4ths of those run DX10+. Personally I'm not buying another DX9 game ever, Skyrim is my last. There's simply no excuse any more.
 
Yea makes no sense to support XP on graphical games. Only 15% of gamers use it. And of the ~75% on Vista and 7, 3/4ths of those run DX10+. Personally I'm not buying another DX9 game ever, Skyrim is my last. There's simply no excuse any more.

Then you're not going to be buying games for a long while. I'll bet money wen the new consoles come out that they'll be running dx9.
 
Then you're not going to be buying games for a long while. I'll bet money wen the new consoles come out that they'll be running dx9.

Oh I don't know. There's WarFighter, and whatever successor to BF3 DICE rolls out and BF3 DLC, along with several other frostbite 2.0 engine using games, and then Unreal Engine 4 games whatever those may be. Good enough for me..
 
Oh I don't know. There's WarFighter, and whatever successor to BF3 DICE rolls out and BF3 DLC, along with several other frostbite 2.0 engine using games, and then Unreal Engine 4 games whatever those may be. Good enough for me..

Oh, I was thinking of *good* games. :cool:

/zing/
 
Then you're not going to be buying games for a long while. I'll bet money wen the new consoles come out that they'll be running dx9.

Considering that in all likelihood the next Xbox will run on some flavour of the Window 8 kernel i'd put my money on you being wrong in this instance.
 
Considering that in all likelihood the next Xbox will run on some flavour of the Window 8 kernel i'd put my money on you being wrong in this instance.

So what if it runs a win8 kernel? Best case, it probably will run a dx10 card...and it'll be a year or more after the console hits shelves that people start seriously bothering with dx10.
 
Yea makes no sense to support XP on graphical games. Only 15% of gamers use it. And of the ~75% on Vista and 7, 3/4ths of those run DX10+. Personally I'm not buying another DX9 game ever, Skyrim is my last. There's simply no excuse any more.
Boycotting graphics APIs is all the rage these days. Surprised it took you so long to get on board!

No bitwise operators in pixel shaders and a shader instruction limit of 65,536? BOYCOTT THAT SHIT. GOOD GAMES NEED BITWISE OPERATORS FOR THEIR SHADERS.
 
like how ever one over looks the really neat stuff like FCMOV is 100% now and SSE2 is nearly 100% as well
 
Boycotting graphics APIs is all the rage these days. Surprised it took you so long to get on board!

No bitwise operators in pixel shaders and a shader instruction limit of 65,536? BOYCOTT THAT SHIT. GOOD GAMES NEED BITWISE OPERATORS FOR THEIR SHADERS.

Yes, of course, those being the only two (or even two of the major) features of DX11.
 
Yes, of course, those being the only two (or even two of the major) features of DX11.
My point is that it these technical advances aren't as vital to rendering as you might think. Certain things become possibilities that weren't before, but mostly things just get faster. Even the things you might believe would be hugely beneficial from a performance perspective aren't in many scenarios.

I've said before that I don't think there's a compelling reason to write to D3D9 anymore. With feature levels, you can still hit D3D9 hardware and get the perks of the cleaner, more efficient D3D10/11 API. I'm not going to boycott games just because they're D3D9, though, because that really makes no sense.
 
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