Yeah, I've been noticing the new scores since they went up.
Overall the change isn't that much different from a year ago.
It is still clearly showing one thing though.
A very large percentage of users are on Budget-Range Hardware.
You get quite a bit of postering on forums about what hardware some people have but to see that most of these people are part of a minority is interesting to say the least.
It does clearly show what Developers should realistically be aiming at though.
Most Common System Setup (according to Steam) is:
AMD 2.0/2.2 GHz Processor SSE/SSE2/3DNow!
512MB Memory
Radeon 9600 Graphics Processor
70-80GB HDD with 10-20GB Free
DVD-Rom
2Mb Broadband
Windows XP Service Pack 2 (English) on NTFS
What is interesting though is overall more people own Intel Processor and NVIDIA Graphics Cards
It's definately worth a look when you have a chance because anyone planning to push DBP for thier development should understand that most of those surveyed will be the people most likely to use your games.
It is very obvious that Shader Hardware is now extremely common-place. However it is also clear that this same hardware is not designed to be particularly quick with heavy Shader games. (i.e. Doom 3) So is very good to note this.
It should also be good to note that again the largest market is running at approx. Pentium 3.0 GHz. So this again is what developers should be aiming towards, although personally I'd shoot a little lower. As your not sure how many are Celeron/Duron Processors that can't perform quite as well despite the similar speeds.
I was a little surprised to see DVD-Roms now becomming by far the most common place. I have one, but I very rarely use it. In-fact I think I've only used it for Half-Life 2 and SuSE. Not much else I get comes on DVD.
It's cool when companies do market research for you and give you the results for free. Just hope that Mod makers are paying attention to thier major user-base.
