Interesting Half-Life 2 user hardware survey

Last night I updated my Steam client for Half-Life 2 (link) and was asked to participate in a survey. I think I answered a couple generic questions, but then it asked me if I wanted to send a comprehensive list of my system specs. So I thought, "sure, why not", its only my CPU speed and hard-drive sizes.

After you finish with the brief survey you're taken to the results page on steampowered.com where you can see results from the 1,129,787 people who also participated in the survey (as of 11:00am PST (19:00 GMT), November 20 2004).

The survey results show a lot of stuff including the following stats:

  • Network Speed - Largely dominated by 256Kbps - 1,024 Kbps.

  • RAM - Roughly 48% of users have between 256 MB to 512 MB and 29% with 512 MB to 1 Gb.

  • CPU - Fairly diverse, but the bulk of people fall into 1.5 Ghz to 3.0 Ghz.

  • Video Card Driver Name

  • Video Card Description - Pretty much all over the board, pretty much only ATI and NVidia boards.

  • Windows Version - Not surprising, XP dominates this category taking the three top spots for a combined 87.4% stronghold.

  • Processor Vendor - Either AMD or Intel and they're pretty close with Intel taking nearly 53% and AMD trailing with 47%.

  • Processor Count - Pretty standard at 99.77% as single-processor computers.

  • Game Screen Width - Majority (28%) seems to be 1024x768.
  • Game Screen Depth
  • Game Renderer

  • Language - English takes lead at 77.26%, followed by French and German with 6.9% each.
  • Other Settings

  • DriveType - Perhaps the only real "shocker" to me in the whole survey, but seemingly 77% of people had DVD drives and 15% have CD-Rom.
  • FreeHD
  • TotalHD

Survey Results [steampowered.com]

Update: It seems that the stats are updated every 30 minutes and another 900+ people have participated. Not too bad, approximately 1800 per hour.

Posted by peter on November 20, 2004 at 12:45 PM
Comments

I suspect some answer the survey thinking of the machine they are dreaming of instead of the one they are on now... (DVD for instance)

But I would guess such survey is basically near reality (perhaps at 90%)

Posted by: Gilles at November 21, 2004 07:15 AM

It would be good if they could differentiate between those who answered manually and those that answered automatically (as the automatic responses would be more accurate).

Posted by: Darryl Lyons at November 21, 2004 02:45 PM

I would guess that DVD is a DVD-ROM, not a DVD-Burner. That would explain such high percentage - I don't play games with from my CD-Burner, I put them in my DVD player because it has a slightly faster data transfer rate.

Posted by: darron at November 22, 2004 01:14 PM