Posted on Wednesday, August 19 2009 @ 6:01 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Bright Side of News analyzed the results of the Steam Hardware Survey July 2009 to discover the latest trends among gamers. You can check out the results
over here. Here's a snip about GPUs:
Looking at graphic cards, nVidia has 65.38% of all Steam users, while ATI covers 27.26%. During July, 1.72% of all users upgraded to DirectX 10 compliant hardware, mostly ditching their old DirectX 9.0c graphics cards such as GeForce 6/7 and Radeon X800/1K series. Biggest winner in GPU wars is ATI Radeon 4800 series, taking around 160,000 new users [0.77% MoM growth, 7.23% overall].
When it comes to available memory, 35.75% of all users have 2GB of system memory [1.19% decline], followed by 3GB [1.17% MoM growth, 27.33% overall] and 1GB [1.26% loss, 16.35% overall]. Extrapolating these numbers, we can see that majority of new upgrades either feature 4 or 6GB of memory, limited by operating system [3.25GB is usually the maximum 32-bit OS can see]. Moving on to GPUs, vast majority of video cards feature 512MB [0.46% MoM growth, 38.69% overall], but 896MB [0.56% growth, 3.19% overall] and 1024MB [1.19% growth, 9.63%] are making steady progress. We estimate that next month, share of graphics cards with more than 1GB of video memory will surpass 10-12%, given the Back-To-School shopping bonanza.
