Taking a Look at the Latest Steam Hardware Survey

It’s been quite a while since I last checked out Valve’s official ‘Steam Hardware & Software Survey’, so given we’re fresh into the second-half of the year, I decided to see where things stand. A lot has changed since last October, and as we’re currently in the preparation stage of a GPU test suite overhaul, the information to be gleaned from this can prove quite useful.

At some point since the last time we checked out the survey, 1080p has quite surprisingly become the most-popular resolution used, sitting currently at 22.97% and increasing on a monthly basis. In similar territory, 1920×1200 owns 7.95% while 1680×1050 is responsible for 19.57%. Interestingly, almost all resolutions below 1680×1050 are decreasing in usage with each passing month, with some exceptions likely due to notebook usage.

While those using dual-core CPUs still dominate the list with 47.92% usage, quad-cores are not far behind at 43.06%. Six-cores are just above a single percent with 1.31%, while single-core CPU usage seems to be plummeting, dropping 1.42% over the past month to sit at 6.16%. At this rate, we could well see single-core usage get knocked down to 1 or 2% by year’s end.

Where graphics cards are concerned, it’s much more difficult to call one a winner, because the most-used model still sits at a mere 5.45%. With both its GeForce 9800 and 8800 cards, NVIDIA owns the top 10%. Something that’s nice to see is that the bulk of the top-half of the list includes mainstream and higher cards, rather than be inundated with super-budget offerings (NVIDIA’s GT 150 does sit in seventh place at 3.31%, however).

With the growing popularity of multi-monitor gaming, Valve has added a metric for that, and it shows that 9.34% of multi-monitor users are running the strange resolution of 3600×1080. Is that three monitors, or two? I’d love to know! The ultra-high resolution of 5760×1080, which we’ve performed many tests on in the past, sits at a mere 0.65%.

For my fellow stat freaks, you can check out the rest of the details at the URL below. We’ll revisit the survey again in a few months and see if any major shifts have occurred.