Following its tradition, Valve released December stats for its Steam Hardware Survey. Without any doubt, this is most comprehensive “feel” what gamers use, given the fact that Steam is used by over 15 million people.
Steam Hardware Survey, December 2008
Following our article with November 2008 details, here are the changes:
- AMD lost 1.04% of CPU share in December alone – Intel gained that share
- Nvidia lost 0.47% of its GPU share, while AMD/ATI gained 0.45%
- Out of those 0.47%, 0.25% bought a graphics card with 1GB of video memory
- Quad-Core processors are now used by 10.76%, up 0.64% from Nov ’08
- 50.81% of all users have at least 2 cores to play with
- DirectX 10 API is now used by 22.88% of all users, up 1.45% from Nov ’08
- 41.5% users use widescreen resolution, gained 1.47% from Nov’08
- Multi-GPU configurations are still used by less than 2% of all users, with 1.84% (+0.06%). This means that just 300.000 Steam gamers have more than one GPU in their computer.
- Revenue-wise, these 300.000 gamers spent 200+ million USD on their GPU hardware alone, or equal revenue to 1.2 million mainstream users (if they spent $199 on a card)
We can conclude that roughly 1% of all users (150.000) bought new systems, mostly equipped with quad-core processors and ATI Radeon graphics cards. Given the fact that cut-off for SHS is 10th in the month, only Steam Hardware Survey for January 2009 will show all the Christmas sales results. Then, we can see what happened with the base of Steam users.
This does not include the whole world, so there is a lot of room for free interpretation, but bear in mind that this number includes more than 15.5 million users worldwide. And Steam itself is gaining users, so it will be interesting to see how it will all equal out.
