Steam post 2012 hardware and software survey results

Every year Steam conduct an extensive survey of its users showing the latest hardware and software trends. This year’s results as usual make for very interesting reading.

In terms of the graphics card department – Nvidia prevails. With a 47% share of GPUs, AMD/ATi 35% and Intel had 11%. The most common amount of VRAM was 1GB, with 38% of gamers having that much. The most popular graphics solution across Steam gamers was the GTX 560, followed by Intel HD 3000 integrated graphics and with the GTX 460 coming in at a respectable third. AMD’s most popular card was the HD 5770 which scraped in at 5th place.

The processor department sees the dual core still being the most popular option with 50.75% of the steam market share, quad cores had 37% and 6 cores had just 2.5%. Intel had 72% of the market whilst AMD had 28%. The majority of gamers had clock speeds of between 2.3 and 2.69GHz whilst only 0.46% had clock speeds over 3.7GHz.

The trend with system RAM is interesting, the majority of Steam users (31%) packed 5GB or more of RAM whilst the next most popular option was 4GB with 23%. An indication that people have been taking advantage of extremely low RAM prices.

Windows 7 was by far the most popular operating system accounting for 70% of systems, XP accounted for 15% and Vista for 10% – the other 5% is mainly made up of Mac operating systems.

The most common resolution was 1080p with 25%, followed by 1366 by 768 at 18% and 1680 by 1050 at 10%. 2560 by 1600 resolution uptake was very low – only 0.16% and multi-monitor set ups were even rarer. The most common multi-monitor resolution was 3840 x 1080.

35% of users had a hard drive between 250-500GB in size and 70% of users possessed a Microphone.

The most common applications, other than Steam of course, were Adobe flash player, followed by Adobe acrobat and Mozilla Firefox.

You can read the full and very detailed report here.