| czecherychestnut said: If consoles didn't exist many PC gamers would just complain about the legion of HP Pavilion and Dell Inspiron users rocking 4 yr old integrated graphics and dual core Celeron's holding back PC gaming. |
True, I wrote something similar some posts above you.
| czecherychestnut said: Just look at the latest Steam hardware survey (which is skewed towards higher end PC's anyway due to its gaming nature). Most common GPU? Intel HD 4000 series. Most common CPU? Dual core between 2.3 and 2.9 GHz. |
Well, the Steam stats offer a little more information than the most popular GPU and CPU. The share of the Intel HD 4000 series has stagnated in the last months while the GTX 970 had an impressive growth and is now the second most popular GPU.
If we assume that the average monthly growth of Steam accounts since February has been ~4 million, the number of Steam users with Maxwell GPUs (750/ti+960+970+980) has improved from 6.3 million to 9.7 million within the last quarter, a gain of 3.4 million:
If the average monthly growth of Steam accounts since February has been ~5 million, the number of Steam users with Maxwell GPUs would have improved from 6.3 million to 9.9 million within the last quarter, a gain of 3.6 million:
So 3.4 - 3.6 million Maxwell GPUs ( + Radeon sales + late Kepler sales) = over 4 million new GPUs, which can keep up with the PS4 or at least XBO, were sold to Steam-gamers within the last quarter.
In the same time frame 1.4 million Xbox consoles (360 + XBO) were shipped and in a few days we know the Sony and Nintendo numbers. Besides the strong holiday quarter the growth rate of capable GPUs seems to keep up quite well compared to the 8th gen consoles.
