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- Ender64, on 12/28/2007, -2/+32Valve's survey is much better:
http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html - heartless_, on 12/28/2007, -2/+25Poor AMD and ATI.
- kiiwii, on 12/28/2007, -3/+22Interesting, but not a good representation of what PC Gamers really are using.
It's only a good representation of what 3dMark06 users are using, which I imagine is a small percentage of PC gamers. And of that small percentage, the sample probably represents the more "hardcore" PC gamers which would skew the numbers towards the higher end products. - kiiwii, on 12/28/2007, -0/+16Who the heck are the 87 people playing on a 6 inch monitor?
- adamdon89, on 12/28/2007, -1/+16I really hope AMD pull some rabbits out their hat in 2008. Its not going to be good for consumer if Intel are running the show for another year
- joegibes, on 12/28/2007, -1/+12I liked reading Valve's hardware survey stats.
- Scorps111, on 12/28/2007, -0/+11Loving the person with the cpu AllYourBaseAreBelongToCPUloop_2 1
- Aero347, on 12/28/2007, -1/+10This poll by 3dmark06 only represents the people that aren't so embarrassed about their computers they actually want to know their score.
Not necessarily the majority. - BenKenobi88, on 12/28/2007, -0/+9I don't know, but they are heroes.
- Arramol, on 12/28/2007, -0/+8People who hacked their DS to run Steam.
- Arramol, on 12/28/2007, -1/+9I wish more software developers would pay attention to things like the Valve survey. Crysis is apparently selling fairly poorly because its system requirements are so high that most gamers can't run it at decent settings. Lo and behold, people aren't interested in buying games they can't actually play. Valve's Source engine, by contrast, is incredibly efficient. I was able to run it at very high settings on my old system with a GeForce 6600GT. If developers would make their games more scalable, we wouldn't hear of people flocking to consoles because they think you need to buy a $300 video card every two years to play recent PC games. High system requirements are shrinking the PC game market.
- Arramol, on 12/28/2007, -0/+7Honest question: how much difference does a dedicated card make? I'm running on-board sound at the moment and haven't noticed any real problems, but I don't have a standard of comparison. It seems to handle my 4.1 surround set-up reasonably well. Would a dedicated card really give me that big of an improvement?
- chedabob, on 12/28/2007, -0/+6Technically, ATI is their graphics division, and is referred to as such.
- Muncher, on 12/28/2007, -0/+4And what, exactly, is wrong with onboard sound? Sure, it's not perfect, but the average person isn't going to want to spend hard earned cash for a negligible improvement in sound quality. Especially if they have crappy speakers (like myself). I don't personally use onboard sound, I'm just saying...
- Arramol, on 12/28/2007, -1/+5I wouldn't say a typical gamer has an 8800 looking at Valve's survey. Yes, it's the highest ranking card class, but it still constitutes less than 10% of the market, meaning >90% are using something other than a GeForce 8800 class card. Still, you're right about this being an excellent time to upgrade or build a new system. I'm typing this on my brand new quad-core machine that cost me ~$1000.
- BenKenobi88, on 12/28/2007, -0/+3Well...people apparently still buy computers from stores...
- cyberwarriorx, on 12/28/2007, -0/+2Well, at least on the hardware end we're getting there(with Athlon 64's and Core 2 Duo's, etc.). The real problem is still in drivers and applications. A lot of companies just don't seem interested or something.
- Amazetbm, on 12/28/2007, -2/+4I hope so too. To top it all off, Intel has been holding back some newer processors because they haven't any real need to release them...yet. I'm thinking they're avoiding all out crushing AMD so they won't have any anti-trust eyes turned on them.
- CarzorStelatis, on 01/03/2008, -0/+2So in other words, we'll wait until the current architecture isn't good enough before moving to a new one? Sounds fine to me. At the moment users have a choice: the extra memory addressing of 64-bit operating systems, or the software and hardware compatibility of 32-bit. Most consumers will choose the latter.
- inactive, on 12/28/2007, -0/+2Crysis is scalable, crysis can run on a 6600gt, with a celeron processer, and 512 of ram, because it is scalable, and it will look better than farcry while it does it. The difference between half life 2 and crysis is that crysis is even more scalable than halflife because it can go higher, much higher.
- weizilla, on 12/28/2007, -0/+2that's how it was with intel and amd when dual cores first came out. intel rushed the market and just stuck two single cores together while amd took a month longer and made good dual cores. then intel come back a few moths later with core 2 duo which was better than amd's (if i remember correctly)
- cdawzrd, on 12/28/2007, -0/+2Funny. I run it at medium and get 36 fps on an amd x2-3800 and a 7900gs...
- Jett3, on 12/28/2007, -0/+2when i built mine, i never got a sound card and the first harddrive i bought was an 80GB just to get it up and running. i later added in a 250GB harddrive, but since i had my OS on my 80, it's still my primary
- Viral, on 12/28/2007, -0/+2A quick Google search renders your argument destroyed, sir.
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/591/8/
http://www.guru3d.com/article/content/432/13/
The first link shows how a single 2600 XT fails miserably, and the second shows how crossfire fails. Crossfire and SLI aren't supported by all games, and you will run into games that don't properly support one or the other. Why waste the money on two cards to sometimes be reduced to one?
Also, even if the two cards combined literally doubled the video processing capacity (which it doesn't) you still couldn't match a single 2900 XT on most benchmarks. You would have been far better off with a single 8800 GT and saved yourself $50.
In the past I have preferred ATI to nVidia, but give recognition where it's due; nVidia has put out a damn good series of cards. - funkydude101, on 12/28/2007, -0/+2What's stupid is the inability to move to 64bit architecture because we are too invested in 32bit.... What's the point of having 4gb of ram as shown in the graphs if 32bit xp and vista are only capable to use 3gb of it under normal circumstances. I only learnt this AFTER I purchased 4gb of ram because it's so cheap now. We will bottleneck ourselves under 32bit before we move to 64....
- aladrin, on 12/28/2007, -0/+2So you've had much better luck with AMD/ATI because... Oh, right, because you don't use anything else. Great logic there.
- kendawg, on 12/28/2007, -0/+2No, it wouldn't make a big difference. The people with sound cards will swear they are 1.03274x as good as on-board, but it doesn't matter. You won't hear the difference.
- Arramol, on 12/28/2007, -0/+2GameSpot did a performance test with Crysis and found that it chugs on older systems: http://www.gamespot.com/features/6182806/index.htm ...
Particularly telling is this quote, "Our slowest machine, a 3.0GHz Pentium 4 paired with a GeForce 6800, barely managed to run the game at the lowest settings." Their actual benchmarks show that system getting a meager 21fps at medium settings with an 800x600 resolution. - tendonut, on 12/30/2007, -0/+1I'd hate to think that THAT many people are gaming on laptops...no wonder console gamers think their systems are so much better than PCs.
- tendonut, on 12/30/2007, -0/+1You clearly don't have a good card matched up with high quality speakers and/or headphones. Night and day dude.
- tendonut, on 12/30/2007, -0/+1Well the problem is, people don't seem to think of sound as being as important as graphics. I beg to differ though. Once you experience all a good sound card has to offer, you can't stand going back to basic onboard. Besides, you can get a decent X-Fi card well under $100 now.
- fruitbomb, on 12/31/2007, -0/+1Wow, Lot's of Nvidia cards in the results. Pretty sad for ATI, although there are a good influx of AMD processor's being used because they used to be used in previous gen machines
- itachi01, on 12/29/2007, -1/+2lies, nvidia the 9-series isn't even out yet, you sir fail.
- fuzzynyanko, on 12/28/2007, -0/+1Interesting, but hard to judge on that one. It shows how many people use 3dMark, but not total sales. Personally, I'm too lazy to install 3dMark. @ the Valve survey: wow do a lot of people use the FX5200 and the NVidia Geforce 4MX
- bahamutxd, on 12/28/2007, -0/+1better architecture (huge improvement over Netburst), isn't Phenom still K8 and has less L2 cache?
- Kallius, on 12/28/2007, -1/+2"Better" as in content? Or "better" in that they don't use a lame-ass ***** server that goes down after 68 diggs?
- funkydude101, on 12/28/2007, -0/+1I find that Lost Planet is similar....it runs very poorly on my E6600 running vista with an 8600GTS and 4gb of ram....I can maybe do 800x600 with everyone turned low. Sure the 8600 isn't great but it can run bioshock at 1680x1050 with everything high just fine.
- Scynet, on 12/28/2007, -3/+4After looking at Valve's survey results, a typical gamer DOES seem to have a 8800 and some dual core CPU with 2GB of RAM. I know I do in about 7 days, and most of the folks I know do too. With the excellently priced 512Mb 8800GTs out there, this is an awesome time to upgrade a PC to a high-end monster. You can do it for less than 1000€, since most already have a monitor.
I think you're partly wrong, parent. - Viral, on 12/28/2007, -0/+1Sounds like most laptops to me...
- CarzorStelatis, on 01/03/2008, -0/+1It is completely unreliable. This only gathers samples from gamers who have upgraded their machine, or think it is running slower than it should. The Valve Hardware Survey is much better, because it gathers data from people who are _actually playing games_ rather than running a niche benchmarking program.
- ferrofluid, on 01/05/2008, -0/+1Yes 'money no object' developers with state of the art rigs, forget that 90% of the people out there have cruddy older hardware and malware infested PCs.
So yes people are flocking to consoles for trouble free 'family and party' gaming, Wii for general use and Xbox360 and PS3 for hardcore.
No contest choosing between $250 for a Wii and $1000 plus for a new gaming PC. - ferrofluid, on 01/05/2008, -0/+1audio hardware can be done two ways, one is full hardcore chipsets, the other is codec based and CPU driven with minimal hardware.
both onboard and PCI audio cards can be either, cheap is mostly CPU driven, as are most onboard audio solutions.
If the CPU is constantly supplying the audio hardware with large amounts of wav files then this makes gaming on older hardware slower,
likewise I prefer PS/2 mice because they are more reliable and smoother than USB mice for FPS gaming in my experience. - ferrofluid, on 01/05/2008, -0/+1yes, 3Dmark is reporting what NEW owners and upgraders are doing, people with older but stable PCs dont run 3Dmark much.
and 80% of the people out there prob never have heard of it anyway, or cant be bothered to run it. - afractus, on 12/28/2007, -2/+3Crysis is selling poorly because its a ***** game. Just because a game is pretty doesn't mean its good.
- ferrofluid, on 01/05/2008, -0/+1That could be the CPU having trouble supplying the data to the onboard D/As, better dedicated PCI audio cards are bus mastering and use DMA, so should be smooth.
It only seems to be some mobos and some onboard chipsets that suffer crackle, buy a $30 PCI card and hear the improvement. - ferrofluid, on 01/05/2008, -0/+1NVidia Geforce 4MX as used in HPs and similar circa 02 03.
Still a DX8 card ! and works for older gaming, which is what a lot of people still do. - Shaflugi, on 12/28/2007, -0/+1My computer isn't store-bought, and I have onboard sound. Sound just isn't important enough to me to buy a dedicated card. The only problem this one has is the constant cracking and popping when there's loud sounds, which can easily be fixed by turning my OS' volume down and my headphone's volume up. I'd also like to run EAX, but again, it's not terribly important.
- kflott, on 12/31/2007, -0/+1How accurate can this data be? I know I typically only run 3dmark after an upgrade to see what performance change I've gotten from the upgrade. Seeing as I haven't upgraded my PC in quite some time, I haven't run 3dmark or submitted any data to them. Seems to me these results will naturally be skewed towards the high end, as gamers with higher end or recently upgraded systems are more likely to benchmark their system.
- ferrofluid, on 01/05/2008, -0/+1The tactical team based FPS game Tremulous based on the GPL Q3 engine source,
fantastic game with monster 90fps on medium hardware, but still looks stunning.
Works great on windows and Linux, great fun on a LAN or online, 150 plus maps for it.
- TheWindBlows, on 12/29/2007, -0/+1We've got the start of 128 bit architectural processors at the moment too...
Also set 1 GB of that ram to Video shared in your BIOS to help out with performance slightly or multitasking.
Linux doesn't need more than 1GB of RAM so I set 512MB of my 2 GB to Shared to help out with multitasking performance as I like to use the Virtual Desktops like mad... -
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