Steam’s Hardware Survey Gets More In-Depth

If you’ve ever wanted to get an idea of what video cards, processors, or Windows’ versions were the most popular, there’s always been one great source: Valve. Thanks to the wide usage of their Steam platform, they’ve been able to collect details about PCs for those who opt in, and their overall reports have been updated on a pretty regular basis. Last week, this survey saw a rather large overhaul, and the data is just as interesting as ever.

The revamped survey is in-depth, and if you want to know what system configurations are the most popular, this is the place to look. To help put things into perspective, the survey will now be updated once per month, and beside each figure will be an increased or decreased percentage number, so you can really keep on top of current trends.

The last update was completed just a few weeks ago, and some of the results are pretty interesting. Where GPUs are concerned, NVIDIA holds the vast majority, at 65.11%, with the 8800 GT proving to be the most common card. Thanks to how ATI names their GPUs, we can’t get real specific. All we know is that the “HD 4800 Series” is the most popular choice from that camp.

For CPUs, Intel holds a fairly similar share as NVIDIA for the GPUs, at 63.62%. Where multi-core CPUs are concerned, we can see that 40% of the gaming market is still using a single-core chip, while Dual-Core adoption is on a steady incline. Quad-Cores are seeing slower growth, but currently sits at 10.43%. It’s also not much of a surprise that Windows XP is still the leading OS, at 68.67%, but Vista 32-bit is slowly catching up, to currently sit at 23.19%.

We’ll be sure to take a fresh look at this survey every so often, because it’s a rather invaluable resource to see current trends. I do think there are improvements that could be made (eg: showing much higher options for both RAM and storage), but there’s still no other service like this one, that I know of, so it’s hard to complain.

Each month, Steam collects data about what kinds of computer hardware our customers are using. The survey is incredibly helpful for us as game developers in that it ensures that we’re making good decisions about what kinds of technology investments to make. Making these survey results public also allows people to compare their own current hardware setup to that of the community as a whole.