Madshrimps Forum Madness - Steam Hardware Survey December: NVIDIA biggest winner

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.

Valve released their HW stats, you can check them out here: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

You'll notice almost no change in CPU brand usage, the Intel/AMD division is still at 70/30; the amount of CPU cores is going up more noticeably, with almost 25% using Quad Core desktop CPU. AMD's X3 CPUs are not very successful it seems, only 0.95% market share.

The biggest shakers come from the Windows OS usage, Windows 7 x64 has gone from 5% in August to 15% in December! In that same period XP usage went from 53% to 44.77%; we can now no longer claim that more than half of gamers still use XP!

On the Graphics front Valve provides us with individual product names, Geforce 8800 strong in the lead here; but no overall ATI <> NVIDIA numbers? Time to launch Excel:

Market share of NVIDIA and ATI rose in the last month of 2009, NVIDIA holding the largest piece of the pie; and ATI becoming the "2nd" large player, surpassing all the "others". Intel GPUs are not popular amongst gamers; Interesting to note is that the market penetration of HD 5000 series is very low (0.55%) and this only in the last month. If ATI was able to produce their HD 5850/5870 in larger quantities we might have seen another chart.

Looking at the desktop vs mobile GPUs (desktop vs laptop gamers) we get this chart:

Mobile gaming is not very popular overall, NVIDIA's GPU share dropped quite a bit since the summer; ATI rose a tiny bit, but with less than 2% using ATI mobile GPUs, they don't make a big dent.

Do note that these stats are from gamers, surely there are thousands of none-gaming laptops out there with NVIDIA/ATI GPUs, but they are not being used to play games.