[sldev] [META] Steam Hardware survey

[Laurent Laborde]

yet another steam survey : http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html
This survey began on May 30th, 2007. This page last updated: 8:01pm
PST (04:01 GMT), August 21 2007

What's interesting here ?
- Around 75% of users have less than 1GB of ram (which is the minimum
to run SL, imho)
- 75% are still single-core cpu.
- NVidia > ATI
- At least 52% of gfx card support Shader Model 3
- A insane amount of players run really outdated drivers.
- A majority of players run 17" screen or less (wtf?!)
- around 50% of pci-express cards
- 1.19% of user have multi-GPU (with 95% of SLI and 5% of crossfire
... *LOL at ATI*)
- 70% have 256MB or less of VRAM
- 3.16% of multi-screen (i tought it was less than that)
- 82% of card support 2x and 4x MSAA. (when will we have AA support in
SL ? Forcing the driver to use AA isn't fun nor easy for a lot of ppl)
- 70% of user have a microphone
- 90% of Windows XP (steam don't run on Linux or MacOS X)
- 2.31% of user support DirectX 10 (Vista + Gfx Card)
- 99.36% support SSE
- 84.76% support SSE2

My config for SL :
- Q6600 Quadcore, 2.4Ghz overclocked at 3Ghz
- 2GB RAM @1333Mhz
- one 8800GTX 768MB overclocked at GTX Ultra speed
- Windows Vista 32 bits, latest gfx drivers
- 20" 4:3 screen @ 1400x1050

Tweaked NVidia driver (using nHancer) for SecondLife, all forced in
the driver because SL doesn't support natively some of thoses features
:
16x CSAA (8 color + 16 cv samples)
16x Anisitropic Filtering
High Quality texture filtering
-3.00 Forced negative LOD BIAS
Forced DXT3 (im not sure it have any effect here)

It could be nice to have the possibility to support natively thoses
features in SL instead of playing with the driver registry. Maybe in
the debug setting ?
I can't play without AntiAliasing anymore, honnest, it's SO nicer :D

I play at 1400x1050 Windowed, 0.875 UI Size, 128 to 196m draw distance.
Average FPS 30~60. Up to ~150FPS.
All details maximum (object, terrain, avatar, etc ...)

PS : sorry if the keyword in subject is wrong, i can't find the list
of keywords.

-- 
Ker2x