Valve survey shows hundreds of thousands steamed up

ANOTHER YEAR, another iteration of Valve's always fascinating Steam survey. This one has a weekend's worth of data on it, amounting to specifics culled from over 320,000 steaming gamers.

As is usual in these things, AMD trails Intel in the processor stakes, if only due to the fact that the Source engine is one of the most popular to run on low-end Dell systems. However, perchance, we suspect that the gap is slightly wider than it was six months ago, perhaps suggesting a swing to Intel in the enthusiast sector.

In the graphics stakes, Nvidia takes the cake with a massive margin, far increased over last year. Green team cards come in at almost 59%, with DAAMIT looking at a 36% market share. The reason why is apparent when looking at the most popular cards in use for PC gamers on the service - the 6600, 7600 and 5200 take the top three slots, proving that budget is where it's at. In fact, seven of the top ten most popular cards are Nvidia, with the GeForce 8800 even sneaking in there, which is a fairly spectacular achievement for such a new/expensive card.

Valve has added a new category of statistical analysis, and that's the DirectX shader path type. Eight out of ten Shader Model 3 cards are Nvidia, whilst the vast majority of Shader Model 2 cards are ATI - suggesting that most new graphics buyers are going with the green team.

However, the survey also shows how far Microsoft et al have to go - currently, DX10-capable gamers (ie those with Vista and a DX10 card) make up 1.21% of the gaming population. That's not a large amount, even if it is a vocal minority. µ