Best wishes to our readers on the new year. We hope you had loads of fun and are now hangover-free. We begin the new year with a post for all our gamer readers (and people interested in hardware) – what hardware is popular with the gamers fraternity?
Well, you must have heard of (better: used) Steam (if surprisingly not, it is an online distribution platform developed by the folks who made Half-life). Now steam has access to millions of gamers downloading and playing games through Steam every month, plus the Steam cafe programs. Every month-end, Steam, with permission, records gamer hardware configurations through a small survey. As a consequence, recording a trend of millions of gamers’ hardware usage.
A sample of the popular graphics card trend. Now, my friends didnt agree with me but Nvidia does make a number of sweet graphics cards and outperforms ATI handsomely. In their face now! Thats not just it. The trends for other gaming gear is also monitored. So you can have a fair understanding of what gamers need and trust by looking at the trends for Processors, Graphics Cards, Multi-GPU Systems, RAM, Resolutions, Microphones, Audio Systems amongst many other categories.
Certainly, this is not necessarily a reflection of the technical excellence of a product nor do we promote a herd behavior, but hey! this is certainly a valuable input when trying to make a purchase decision. Aint it so?
Check out the survey results here for more details.
Author: Kinshuk Sunil (72 Articles)
Kinshuk Sunil is the founder of the WiSy Blog. An active evangelist for Open Source and a enthusiast Game Designer, Kinshuk focuses on reviewing Softwares, Services and Games here. However, a jack of all trades, Kinshuk can be found talking about almost everything. Catch up with him on twitter @kinshuksunil.
