Half a Life gamers love ye olde Nvidia

According to the survey, the most typical gamer has a 256Kbps internet connection, a PC with between 256MB to 512MB of RAM, a single 1.7GHz to 2.0 GHz Intel processor, and runs OpenGL games at 1024x768 but only at 16-bit colour.

Perhaps this low colour depth, and relatively low resolution, is because a whopping 58.43% of the half million gamers surveyed are using older Nvidia products, most of which - some 39.9% - are still using Nvidia GeForce MX and GeForce 4 family 3D graphics ‘accelerators'.

This - the survey suggests - is more than double the 25.70% of ATI gamers.

Interestingly most of the ATI gamers are reported to be using mid-range Radeon 9600 series cards, with 9800 and 9500/9700 series cards not so far behind.

Scoring only 0.21%, the Nvidia GeForce FX 5950 Series hardly seems to come on to Valve's radar… and we wonder what this significant delta between a fairly rapid adoption of ATI's mid to high-end modern offerings bodes for the future?

Of course statistics can be interpreted in all sorts of ways and - if we understand things correctly - we note this survey only takes into account systems playing Valve games.

It rather reinforces our general take that once 3dfx folded, Nvidia pretty much owned the gaming market.

However since the glory days of the GeForce 4 Ti 4600, Nvidia seem to have increasingly struggled, and with the introduction of the Radeon 9700 Pro, ATI really started turning the tables.

Nvidia seems to be coming through one of its darkest hours but, but we rather suspect that most newly purchased mid to high-end 3D accelerators currently purchased by gaming enthusiasts, are ATi based. We'll try and get a breakdown of some up-to date figures.

This is a fickle market though, and although neither is coming soon enough, we think that NV40 and id Software's Doom III is likely to set about reversing this trend.

One final thing of note in Valve's survey is regarding the 8.77% of processors surveyed reporting Intel's HyperThreading capability.

We think that Intel's HyperThreading is one of its better technology milestones, but apparently it is not without its problems. Indeed we have heard of various software manufacturers who recommend switching Hyper-Threading off.

We also hear that some overclockers need to switch off HyperThreading to eke out the highest frequencies.

So we wonder what number of Intel processors covered in Valve's survey are Pentium 4 processors that have HyperThreading capability, but have it switched off?

We've got it on good authority that the forthcoming Half-Life 2 will detect and make use of multiple processors, and therefore this should include a single processor with HyperThreading, which would appears as two separate processors.

If Half-Life 2 is not just multi-threaded, but specifically HyperThreading optimised, this could give Intel HT processors the kick up the Netburst that they certainly need in the eyes of enthusiasts and gamers. µ