The latest Steam Hardware & Software Survey is out, and it paints an interesting picture of the PC landscape—or, at least the part that interfaces with Valve’s content delivery platform. Let’s get right to the numbers, starting with CPUs. Unsurprisingly, Intel dominates, with a 72% slice of the pie. Almost exactly half of Steam users have dual-core CPUs, while 38% are running quads. The number of single-core users (7.5%) is more than double the number with greater than four cores.
On the graphics front, 47% of Steam users are running an Nvidia GPU. 36% have a Radeon under the hood, and 11% are stuck with Intel integrated graphics. The remaining 6% are filed under an “other” category that seems to have popped up in the last four months or so. I wonder if Virtu configurations or beta graphics drivers could be responsible for some of that total.
If we drill down into the graphics numbers, we see that Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 560 is the most popular GPU of the DirectX 11 generation. Its 10% share is notably higher than that of the next closest rival, the GeForce GTX 460, which sits at just under 6%. There’s only one AMD GPU in the top six: the Radeon HD 5770, which sits in third place at a little less than 5%.
Mid-range cards dominate the top of the standings, which should come as no surprise considering 95% of folks have their desktop resolution set at 1920×1080 or lower. DirectX 11 GPUs have the largest share, though, with over 41% to DirectX 10’s 37%.
There are a few interesting Windows software statistics in the mix, as well. 63% of users have Firefox installed, but less than 12% are running Chrome. Also, there are nearly as many folks running iTunes (31%) as there are with μTorrent installed (29%).