Steam Hardware Survey Results & Bug Fix

[Jul 25, 2012, 11:58 am ET] - Share - Viewing Comments

The Steam Hardware & Software Survey now offers the June results showing the hardware being used to play games on Valve's service (thanks VG247). These results reflect jump in the use of newer hardware, and they kick off with the following explanation of how this is in part because they've addressed a bug in the system:

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 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).

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11.

Re: Steam Hardware Survey Results & Bug Fix

Jul 25, 2012, 14:56

Verno

Dev wrote on Jul 25, 2012, 14:50:
I don't know if there's many at all that require a quad core to run well. The biggest requirement for most games is to have a certain minimum capability of graphics card. After that, a better graphics card enables things like insane resolutions for multimonitor or 3d gaming

Maybe require was the wrong word, optimized for or whatever. There were quite a few games this gen that were CPU heavy just due to the limited GPU hardware on consoles.

Yeah, switching to an SSD might net you general usage performance, especially if you do a lot of office work on your machine. My desktop is purely for gaming, I have a laptop for general use/office work, so I didn't see much of a gain going with an SSD, except in games with a lot of loading (FO3/NV, Skyrim, etc.). I did stick an SSD in my 3 year old Dell Studio and the difference was phenomenal.

Yeah exactly, although in the games where you do see a difference its often quite drastic. Thankfully you can get cheapish SSDs in large sizes now so you can just dump most games onto one and stop worrying about it.




Playing: Animal Crossing, Sleeping Dogs, Tales of Graces F Watching: Survivorman, Justified, Silent Running

		Date	Subject	Author
	1.	Jul 25, 12:02	Re: Steam Hardware Survey Results & Bug Fix	Verno
	3.	Jul 25, 13:01	Re: Steam Hardware Survey Results & Bug Fix	eunichron
	4.	Jul 25, 13:16	Re: Steam Hardware Survey Results & Bug Fix	ItBurn
	5.	Jul 25, 13:42	Re: Steam Hardware Survey Results & Bug Fix	Angrius Maximis
	6.	Jul 25, 13:44	Re: Steam Hardware Survey Results & Bug Fix	DrEvil
	7.	Jul 25, 14:26	Re: Steam Hardware Survey Results & Bug Fix	jdreyer
	2.	Jul 25, 12:25	Re: Steam Hardware Survey Results & Bug Fix	necrosis
	8.	Jul 25, 14:31	Re: Steam Hardware Survey Results & Bug Fix	Verno
	9.	Jul 25, 14:50	Re: Steam Hardware Survey Results & Bug Fix	Dev
>>	11.	Jul 25, 14:56	Re: Steam Hardware Survey Results & Bug Fix	Verno
	10.	Jul 25, 14:53	Re: Steam Hardware Survey Results & Bug Fix	eunichron
	20.	Jul 26, 15:57	Re: Steam Hardware Survey Results & Bug Fix	Creston
	12.	Jul 25, 15:47	Re: Steam Hardware Survey Results & Bug Fix	RailWizard
	15.	Jul 25, 16:05	Re: Steam Hardware Survey Results & Bug Fix	Dev
	13.	Jul 25, 15:55	Re: Steam Hardware Survey Results & Bug Fix	jimnms
	14.	Jul 25, 15:55	Re: Steam Hardware Survey Results & Bug Fix	jacobvandy
	17.	Jul 26, 02:30	Re: Steam Hardware Survey Results & Bug Fix	Jerykk
	18.	Jul 26, 04:17	Re: Steam Hardware Survey Results & Bug Fix	Armengar
	19.	Jul 26, 09:06	Re: Steam Hardware Survey Results & Bug Fix	Gipson
	21.	Jul 27, 10:48	Re: Steam Hardware Survey Results & Bug Fix	Slashman
	16.	Jul 25, 16:27	Re: Steam Hardware Survey Results & Bug Fix	Muscular Beaver