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Forums - PC Discussion - PC Hardware spec demographics

Alvar on 12 September 2007

nice show for vista



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W29 on 12 September 2007

Well I have an AMD Turion 64 Mobile Technology on my Acer notebook computer and a ATI Radeon XPress 1100 and Windows Vista Ultimate 8)



W29 on 12 September 2007
Alvar said:
nice show for vista

 I know Windows Vista is amazing. I really like the feature where you can cycle through the windows...AMAZING!!!



Entroper on 12 September 2007
W29 said:

I know Windows Vista is amazing. I really like the feature where you can cycle through the windows...AMAZING!!!


I actually thought that was rather useless, UNTIL I discovered that you could locate windows that don't appear on the taskbar with this feature.  So it's nice in that sense, but really it just covers up a problem with the interface that shouldn't have been there in the first place.



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rendo on 12 September 2007
Entroper said:
rendo said:

Considering the topic doesn't mention anything about who the TARGET demographics are, it's unscientific. If the title was Steam Demographics for PC hardware, then I wouldn't care. It's a poll in a niche market, that doesn't represent the entire market. That's my point.


That would be why my first paragraph explains the survey methodology. This is, you know, a gaming forum, and I figured people would be interested in knowing some demographic info about gamers' PCs. Valve certainly is, and I think other game publishers should be as well.

If you look at the survey results, I think they represent the PC gaming market rather well. You can see that most people don't have multicore CPUs, the vast majority don't have SLI or Crossfire or a DX10 GPU. The most popular graphics card was a midrange card three years ago. Most people have less than a GB of RAM. I think it's interesting that PC gamers are not as upgraded as people seem to think they are. Valve seems to be one of the few developers that understands this and designs their games to run very well on average (meaning midrange from three years ago) hardware.

Anyway, what you said in your first post is all I intended to show.


But you also need to consider, Steam has a LOT of people who play some of the classics, HL, CS, TFC, etc etc.  Those games don't require the intense horsepower that is garnered from SLI/CrossFire, dual core, 2 gigs of ram, etc. 

All I intended to point out was the exact same thing you said, but in different words. :D 



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Game_boy on 12 September 2007

I like the feature where it crashes!!! and then it gets viruses!!! and then it slows to a crawl after a month!!! of use!!! AMAZING!!!

And yes, all of those things happened to my new Vista PC, so I'm not quoting random people on the internet.

--

The hardware results are interesting; it really shows the divide between home office and gaming PCs. It's very interesting how very, very few of gamers have DX10+ Vista. It's not economical at all for game publishersto include a DX10 pathway, let alone DX10 only like Halo 2



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BenKenobi88 on 12 September 2007

I have Vista, but only because my friend got it for free and put it on his PC, which I bought from him. It's ok...I'm much more used to XP though...and I can't see how Vista is considered "user-friendly." It took like a half hour just to figure how to share files from my PC to an XP PC in my home network...ridiculous.



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BenKenobi88 on 12 September 2007

I like the volume control in Vista...it automatically lists volume sliders for any programs outputting sound, so Firefox, AIM, Windows itself, Master Volume, etc. Found that out yesterday...kinda cool.



LEFT4DEAD411.COM
Bet with disolitude: Left4Dead will have a higher Metacritic rating than Project Origin, 3 months after the second game's release.  (hasn't been 3 months but it looks like I won :-p )

Entroper on 12 September 2007
rendo said:

But you also need to consider, Steam has a LOT of people who play some of the classics, HL, CS, TFC, etc etc. Those games don't require the intense horsepower that is garnered from SLI/CrossFire, dual core, 2 gigs of ram, etc.

All I intended to point out was the exact same thing you said, but in different words. :D


Yeah, when I went back and read your first post, I realized we were kinda saying the same thing.  :)

Still, I don't think that people who are only playing the classics like HL, CS, and TFC are doing it on PCs with 512 MB of RAM and GeForce 6600s.  All three of those games ran like butter on my P3 550 MHz, 128 MB RAM, TNT2 Ultra.  The average spec PC according to the survey can run HL2 like a champ, but what's important is that it shows that a lot of these people haven't upgraded their computers beyond that level.  These are definitely people who would be interested in games like TF2 and new episodic content for Half-Life.



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rendo on 12 September 2007

Well say for example you're a Halo 2 addict. Halo 2 runs PERFECT on the Xbox, why upgrade to the 360 just to play it? That's probably what a lot of the Steam gamers are like. They have a PC configuration that plays the game perfectly for their needs, 1024x768 60fps+ etc etc, so they don't need anything beyond that as it's overkill. It's the ones who play beyond those games, and beyond steam that have the higher end systems. That's at least, how I presume it to be.