Bennett Ring18 May 2008, 6:30 PM
Creative and AMD/ATI are the big losers in the latest Steam survey of gamers' hardware rigs.
While it’s not indicative of PC hardware as a whole, Valve’s quarterly Hardware Survey provides a nice snapshot of the average gaming PC. The latest results for this voluntary survey, distributed via Steam, provide an interesting insight into how PCs in the real world have changed in the last twelve months.
When compared to the results of the survey in June 2007, two results are the most noteworthy; CPU and video cards. Unfortunately for lovers of competition, it seems that AMD is struggling in both the CPU and Video card arenas. AMD CPU users slipped from 49% in June ’07 down to 41.5% in May ’08, while AMD/ATI video card users dropped from 36% down to 30%. While we have to reiterate that these numbers are from gamers, they reinforce the general consensus amongst the hardware community that 2008 isn’t AMD’s finest year.
If you are running an AMD CPU, you’re most likely to have a chip clocked at 2.29GHz, while Intel users tend to have faster chips, with a higher ratio of users sitting somewhere between 2.3GHz and 3.3GHz. Both camps have plenty of RAM though, with more than 2GB being the most popular amount – no doubt a result of rapidly falling RAM prices that have seen 4GB RAM kits selling for less than $100.
In a result that is bound to make Aussies feel a lot better about our woeful broadband speeds, it seems that we’re not alone, with 31% of users worldwide on 2Mbit/sec speeds, while another 25% sat somewhere between a paltry 256kbps and 768kbps. Gamers continue to move towards 16:9 widescreen monitors, with an increase from 13% in 2007 up to 25% in 2008. Perhaps now that one in four gamers use widescreen, game publishers might actually include widescreen options at launch?
Creative soundcards continue to nosedive in use, now accounting for a mere 6% of sound solutions, while the opposite is true of Realtek’s various onboard chips built into motherboards, accounting for a whopping 35%. Finally, while Vista use is slowly spreading, up from 5% last year, this year’s result of 15% shows that it’s still in the minority.
There’s a lot of info within the survey, so we recommend you check it out in full here. And if you’re a Steam user, support this great initiative by taking part in the next survey.