Lazycoder

Valves hardware survey

Great detailed survey by Valve software of their users hardware configurations.

The most interesting stats to me were the version of Windows the users are running and the amount of system ram.

Windows version:
Windows XP 526,199 92.38 %
Windows Vista 33,724 5.92 %
Windows 2000 4,920 0.86 %
Windows 2003 64 bit 4,217 0.74 %
Other 561 0.10 %

System Ram:
256 Mb to 511 Mb 125,716 22.07 %
512 Mb to 999 Mb 265,401 46.59 %

The 92% Windows XP user base doesn’t surprise me given the reviews I’ve seen of Vista from some of the Alpha geeks I read. I can’t imagine what the Vista experience is like for everyday users who don’t want to tweak everything.

The fact that around 70% of the gamers surveyed have a gig of RAM or less less than 1GB of RAM is surprising. But when you browse the local Best Buy/CompUSA/Circuit City/Dell store you find that the default RAM offering is 1GB on most systems. You have to specify more if you want more. I’m betting the default was lower a year or two ago.

But both of these factors have to be taken into consideration if you are writing software for Jane and Joe users. They most likely aren’t going to be running a great big whiz-bang rig like yours.