iTechnoMax

Valve’s November Steam user metrics are up, and it’s (still) a landslide for gamers running Windows XP. 68% of Steam users connect to the online community and games service running the 32-bit version of XP. Compare with just 21% running Vista and a DX10-capable video card. Slightly more than that (25%) are running DX10 GPUs on XP, while a sobering 54% still play with DX9-or-below GPUs.

NVIDIA towers over ATI (27%) with the lion’s share (64%) of GPU usage. Intel’s nibbling crumbs with just 2%. Also: 87% of Steam users run with 4x anti-aliasing enabled, which surprised me, since I have a GTX 280 and often still leave AA zeroed to eek out those extra frames in trade for those highest-of-high level GPU-strangling details.

About 50% of Steam users have dual-core CPUs, a group that’s grown steadily since June 2008, while quad-core users appear to have only inched up a percentage point or two in the same period (10%). The remaining 40%? Yep, still running single cores. In all, Intel dominates with 64% of Steam’s CPU manufacturer demographic, compared with 37% for AMD.

Bear in mind NVIDIA has an install base in the hundreds of millions, so seemingly small percentages may be misleading here, but only 1.55% connect to Steam with two GPUs in SLI configuration, and just .01% have quad-SLI systems. Makes you wonder why NVIDIA even bothers to support the latter, frankly.

Favorite display resolution? Neatly tied between 1024 x 768 (25%) and 1280 x 1024 (25%).

Related posts:

1. New AMD Six-Core Processor Opteron Series Launched
2. NVIDIA Reveals New PhysX Licenses with Electronic Arts, 2K Games (PC World)
3. How to Speed up your Windows XP or Vista Laptop? Follow these Simple Tips
4. How to Install Windows XP on PC with Pre-installed Vista
5. Intel with 9400M chip by Nvidia