| Cerebralbore101 said: Yeah, I looked at the steam stats, and that's the gist of what I got out of it. There are a lot of questions that I have though. How does steam gather its information? Do they just take a snapshot of everyone that is online every friday? Do they survey the entire group or just part of it?figures? |
Steam will send out a prompt for you to "OK" to ask if it can collect your hardware specifications.
It's a fairly large sampling size... But it doesn't ask everyone and nor does it need to. I have been asked about half a dozen times in the last decade or so... And with the power of mathematics it is used to represent the entire population and is fairly accurate all told, which is why you don't see stupidly massive swings between old and new hardware everytime they gather statistics.
| Cerebralbore101 said: If the average CPU speed is 3 gigahertz, and the average user has three physical CPUs does that mean the average user has 9 gigahertz total, or just 3? Or to put it another way, do they include both CPUs in CPU speed, when doing the CPU speed section of the survey? It really would be interesting if VGchartz tracked the sales of PC games, as well as console games. Do they? Does steam track the sales |
No. It means they have a 3Ghz Tri-Core, which is an AMD CPU as Intel never sold a CPU in such a configuration.
Also interesting to note is most of those chips would unlock into full quad-cores by enabling Advanced Clock Calibration.
Steam does track the sales, but they don't generally give that information out, they leave that up to the Developer/Publisher, sometimes we can use player numbers to extrapolate an guestimate though.
| Alby_da_Wolf said: but another thing that initially struck not just me, is that Steam statistics showed that older PCs remain active in gaming much longer than tech enthusiasts suspected (I too initially thought relatively old and slow PCs were mainly stuff for retrogamers like me, but they are far more widespread), and they are the ones that allow PC gaming to grow even with lower purchases of new PCs. |
Most games can be downscaled surprisingly well and most older PC's are actually pretty potent and can run games with a few settings disabled, hardware/tech has stagnated for a long time.
Not to mention most older PC's just need a GPU upgrade and they are up and gaming again.
| Alby_da_Wolf said: The true power of gaming PCs is quite nebulous indeed, and I suspect the average is, again, lower than expected by a minority of enthusiasts that would like PC power to continuously skyrocket. Now these things aren't really surprising anymore, but initially, when Steam numbers started becoming more significant in PC gaming, they were so. OTOH I don't think SW houses were taken by surprise, as PC/console multiplats became very common during 7th gen, when the gap between the average gaming PC and consoles was a lot wider, particularly in main RAM size, while now, compared to then, even if consoles are far behind high-end PCs, they are a lot less limiting if compared to the average PC. |
Actually Steam probably under-represents the true power of PC hardware... Why? It doesn't account for Multi-GPU configurations, there are old systems from half a decade ago with Dual Radeon 5870's that are probably still outbenching newer PC's.
Or if you have Enduro/Optimus based rig Steam statistics will not count your discreet GPU but the GPU that is active, which is often the integrated part.
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