Steam Hardware & Software Survey: April 2014

Only 22% with greater than 1TB total hard drive capacity? How can people survive on that little storage when game installs are eating 20GB+ routinely (or ~50GB for TitanfaIl)?
 
Wow,

It looks like intel is taking a chunk out of AMD's graphics market share. I would have thought with the last couple of generations (Starting with the 6800 series) that AMD would be gaining market share against NVIDIA given their price/performance ratio advantage (Minus the super high end stuff which no one can get a hold of, so there is price gouging.)
 
Kueller said:
Only 22% with greater than 1TB total hard drive capacity? How can people survive on that little storage when game installs are eating 20GB+ routinely (or ~50GB for TitanfaIl)?
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By not keeping all of them on the hard drive? I uninstall games when I'm done with them. Also, there are only a few games that are that massive. And not to mention Dota 2 is Steam only and many players might only play that.
 
DigitalGriffin said:
Wow,

It looks like intel is taking a chunk out of AMD's graphics market share. I would have thought with the last couple of generations (Starting with the 6800 series) that AMD would be gaining market share against NVIDIA given their price/performance ratio advantage (Minus the super high end stuff which no one can get a hold of, so there is price gouging.)
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I don't see much of a slope in that chart on video cards. Certainly nothing I would describe as huge, mostly holding the line. Given that bitcoin/cryptocurrency mining has been eating up AMD parts, I'm not surprised that market share hasn't moved that much form the perspective of steam.
 
The HD capacity thing doesn't shock me at all. We're starting to see more and more SSDs showing up in the 256-512GB range. That combined with a similarly sized disk drive for backups is more than enough in most instances.
I keep 25 games (all from the last 5 years) installed at once and still have 50GB to spare on my 512GB SSD. I weed out the games I'm not playing at the moment since I can always re-download them again if I need. I also keep all of my MP3's on that same drive.
Movies tend to be the real space hogs, but it seems like people either stream them if quality doesn't matter or get the Blu-Ray if it does.
 
DigitalGriffin said:
Wow,

It looks like intel is taking a chunk out of AMD's graphics market share. I would have thought with the last couple of generations (Starting with the 6800 series) that AMD would be gaining market share against NVIDIA given their price/performance ratio advantage (Minus the super high end stuff which no one can get a hold of, so there is price gouging.)
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Probably because of amd drivers. Last amd card i had was 6950, no reason in switching over unless power consumtion is lower like nvidia. Price new is that significant to me since i buy from here or craigslist.
 
Zarathustra[H];1040810181 said:
Still over 5% on XP after EOL. Very disappointing. :rolleyes:
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why? the trend is inverse square, so the usage number is more slowly and slowly approaching zero over time.
 
Kueller said:
Only 22% with greater than 1TB total hard drive capacity? How can people survive on that little storage when game installs are eating 20GB+ routinely (or ~50GB for TitanfaIl)?
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This is just a guess but maybe it is because many users are starting to switch to SSDs as their primary storage for games, and the drive steam is installed on may be the only drive that counts in the survey, and of course very few users own 1TB+ SSDs. I myself store all my games on an SSD now and my library is rather modest so I have enough space.
 
They seem to have a problem with their VRAM data collection: see that there are separate entries for 1023 MB and 1024 MB and this is repeated at 2 GB and 3 GB
 
rflcptr said:
why? the trend is inverse square, so the usage number is more slowly and slowly approaching zero over time.
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If I were the king of the internet, as soon as an OS/browser/whatever hit EOL, it would be instantly blocked from accessing anything at all anywhere. :p
 
Kueller said:
Only 22% with greater than 1TB total hard drive capacity? How can people survive on that little storage when game installs are eating 20GB+ routinely (or ~50GB for TitanfaIl)?
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Stiletto said:
SSDs.
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Exactly.

I have a single 240GB SSD as my only drive installed in my desktop, and it is shared between my Linux and Windows installs, half and half, so in my Steam survey my total storage probably shows up as 120GB.

I find I have no need for any more than that. The 120GB partition Windows is on is pretty much dedicated to Windows and games. I usually only have 1-3 games installed at the same time. All my files are stored on my 12TB NAS in the basement.

It's the best of both worlds. Fast local storage for programs, OS and games, and slower large storage for files. At the same time I keep the hard drive noise out my office!

I see no need for a spinner in my rig anymore. Haven't had one since 2010.
 
Zarathustra[H];1040810454 said:
If I were the king of the internet, as soon as an OS/browser/whatever hit EOL, it would be instantly blocked from accessing anything at all anywhere. :p
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And who decides what constitutes EOL? Just because Microsoft wants to sell a new version?

GTFO of here
 
Kueller said:
Only 22% with greater than 1TB total hard drive capacity? How can people survive on that little storage when game installs are eating 20GB+ routinely (or ~50GB for TitanfaIl)?
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I was under that for YEARS until I started messing with video editing and such on top of photography with DSLR images in RAW.

With steam, games linger in the cloud until I might be near playing them, and if not totally awesome, they get deleted when done. the photography was pretty amenable to archiving on optical media in chunks, or at least picking favorites and almost and ditching the almost made its cuts down a lot.

Video, even short ones, adds up quickly.
 
DigitalGriffin said:
Wow,

It looks like intel is taking a chunk out of AMD's graphics market share. I would have thought with the last couple of generations (Starting with the 6800 series) that AMD would be gaining market share against NVIDIA given their price/performance ratio advantage (Minus the super high end stuff which no one can get a hold of, so there is price gouging.)
Click to expand...

AMD has always been around 30% market share. Which is pretty bad considering this includes integrated graphics.
 
DPI said:
And who decides what constitutes EOL? Just because Microsoft wants to sell a new version?

GTFO of here
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EOL is very simple. When an Operating System (or browser, etc.) no longer is actively maintained and thus ceases to receive regular security updates it is EOL. At that point it is just incredibly, mind-numbingly stupid to continue to use it. It's like asking to become part of a botnet. It's like having a terrible 0-day exploit EVERY day, because those 0-days are never patched.

So, whether MS EOL's something too early or not because they want to sell a new version is kind of irrelevant to this discussion. Once there is no more active security support, it shouldn't be used anymore. period. no exceptions. At least not if it is connected to a network.

At almost 13 years of age XP users got more than their moneys worth. XP is the outlier here. Operating system versions rarely receive support for that long. A 5 year cycle is more appropriate.
 
Zarathustra[H];1040810778 said:
EOL is very simple. When an Operating System (or browser, etc.) no longer is actively maintained and thus ceases to receive regular security updates it is EOL. At that point it is just incredibly, mind-numbingly stupid to continue to use it.
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No, it isn't. Good for you feeling so superior, however.
 
Kueller said:
Only 22% with greater than 1TB total hard drive capacity? How can people survive on that little storage when game installs are eating 20GB+ routinely (or ~50GB for TitanfaIl)?
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install and delete lol. I bought a 2TB WD black for storage in Feb and it fail last week. :( Just ordered another 2TB and hope the best
 
Stiletto said:
No, it isn't. Good for you feeling so superior, however.
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Yes it is.

""End-of-life" (EOL) is a term used with respect to a product supplied to customers, indicating that the product is in the end of its useful life (from the vendor's point-of-view), and a vendor intends to stop marketing, selling, or sustaining it."
 
I'm amazed that nearly 50% of people are apparently still running dual-core processors. :eek:
 
it'd be a nice improvement to track systems using SSDs vs spinning disks.
 
Zarathustra[H];1040810181 said:
Still over 5% on XP after EOL. Very disappointing. :rolleyes:
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You should read the threads where people complain about game X not supporting XP. The troll bait is delicious!
 
MavericK96 said:
I'm amazed that nearly 50% of people are apparently still running dual-core processors. :eek:
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Look at the resolution numbers. The second biggest number is 1366x768. Most people buy the cheapest laptop possible. They look at you crazy if you sugest one over $500 unless it's a mac. Most of those cheap machines are Celeron or Pentium based, most are still dual core.
 
Zarathustra[H];1040810181 said:
Still over 5% on XP after EOL. Very disappointing. :rolleyes:
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If a few of the Steam dev talks, whatever they were called, they noted that that XP number is very low. In China they estimate its more like 50%. Whether or not you care about that, when a game developer sees that though, it is hard to get away for DX9.
 
Kueller said:
Only 22% with greater than 1TB total hard drive capacity? How can people survive on that little storage when game installs are eating 20GB+ routinely (or ~50GB for TitanfaIl)?
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Because you might get people like me that don't have a lot of storage on the desktop... but own a server or NAS with 12TB :D Granted, I did just add another 1TB, so my desktop has 2TB now.
 
Ryokurin said:
Look at the resolution numbers. The second biggest number is 1366x768. Most people buy the cheapest laptop possible. They look at you crazy if you sugest one over $500 unless it's a mac. Most of those cheap machines are Celeron or Pentium based, most are still dual core.
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"Celeron based" currently is an i3 with reduced cache. Don't sell them short in processing capabilities. Onboard graphics, of course, is where the suck is.
 
It isn't surprising that most people are not using performance hardware. When you look at what are the more popular games on PC, they are the likes of LoL, DOTA 2, Heartstone, WoW. Dual core is enough for these games, and certainly more than enough for anything else they might do on their PC.
 
I don't understand why they keep using friggin' Adobe Flash for graphs, when there exists D3. It's unbecoming of a company like Valve.
 
techrat said:
"Celeron based" currently is an i3 with reduced cache. Don't sell them short in processing capabilities. Onboard graphics, of course, is where the suck is.
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Yeah, they've been for a while, but not all of them just have reduced cache. Some also have hyperthreading, virtualization and trusted execution removed, and the graphics are downclocked. For example, the two intel systems currently for sale at Walmart.com are the Celeron 877 and and the Pentium 2020m. Both are dual core dual thread only among other things.
 
I wouldn't put too much effort into analyzing these numbers. I play 2D Steam games on a $400 laptop with an Intel HD GPU. I also sometimes play on a desktop with a dedicated GPU and lots of bells and whistles. Both of my machines would be in these numbers.
 
MetalX said:
I wouldn't put too much effort into analyzing these numbers. I play 2D Steam games on a $400 laptop with an Intel HD GPU. I also sometimes play on a desktop with a dedicated GPU and lots of bells and whistles. Both of my machines would be in these numbers.
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Ditto.

I have Steam installed on my Desktop, my HTPC and my Laptop, with greatly varying specs. I do most of my gaming on my desktop, but occasionally I'll fire something lighter up on the HTPC or the laptop.
 
Zarathustra[H];1040812347 said:
Ditto.

I have Steam installed on my Desktop, my HTPC and my Laptop, with greatly varying specs. I do most of my gaming on my desktop, but occasionally I'll fire something lighter up on the HTPC or the laptop.
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Same here. My laptop is a hacked Chromebook booting XUbuntu. Dualcore Celery with HD 2000 graphics. No records smashed but it certainly can play the occasional casual game in Steam.
 
The graph shows physical CPUs but isn't it more useful to track logical CPUs except for hyperthreading that's usually detrimental to gaming?
 
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