If you go and have a look at http://steampowered.com/status/survey.html' ">http://steampowered.com/status/survey.html - you'll find the results for the Hardware Survey that is conducted when people store and register Half Life 2.

With over a million data points, it's quite comprehensive and in my opinion represents a good sample of the gaming community.

The processor results are interesting - showing a 47/53% AMD/Intel split, both with well over 500,000 processors registering in the sample. The only other make to even register a fraction of a percentage point is CentaurHauls (a VIA chip), and the Cyrix chips, once a viable alternative to those who didn't much care about floating point performace, had a grand total of 19 users now.

It's good to see AMD getting such a share of sections of the market, but I'm dissapointed that they weren't coming out on top here, especially as the AMD64 and FX chips most marketable area has to be gaming. I think this really shows a weakness in marketing on AMDs part

Looking at the top five graphics card brands, Nvidia seem to be in the lead overall, with more people using their hardware (backed by the drivers statistics). Again, in the graphics wars there seems to be no major third player still - but it was interesting to see 3DFX and PowerVR hanging on in there (ahhhh nostalgia over graphics card battles of old)

For the operating systems, I think its amazing that so few have upgraded to XP service pack 2 which (let's face it) is one of the only service packs that has done something for security even if it's just NX and that alert that pops up if your firewall or antivirus go AWOL. For every person who is up to date, there's more than one other who isn't.

For me, the other interesting bit was about HyperThreading - it doesn't seem to be making inroads into the market. Despite intel representing more than half of CPUs in the sample, only 17% have hyperthreading. It's been around a while too - I was expecting it to be higher...

Just thought you'd find it interesting - also lets you see how your own set up compares to the norm

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A64 3200+ on S754 Shuttle System (Clawhammer 1MB). 1GB DDR400 CAS 2.5 Memory, SATA 120GB HDD @ 7200rpm.
GeforceGT 6800 Graphics / 256MB and a massive copper heat pipe cooler that I had to cut parts out of my case to fit in....

holy , I'm surprised at the number of users with SP2 already lol. That patch just came out like a month ago. and already almost superceding SP1 users. everything didn't catch up so fast!

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--======== proud owner of new razor tarantula gaming keyboard ========--

QUOTE Video Card Driver Name:
nv4_disp.dll 546,202 49.67 %
ati2dvag.dll 411,506 37.42 %

Better comparison of nVidia vs ATI

I also wish that AMD had more then Intel.
But compare AMD's resources to Intel's and it's actualy a very good number.

I find it intersting that they choose not to specify the type of CPU though.
(Like they did with graphics cards)

I would be interested in the number of Athlon 64's, XP's, vs P4's and Celerons.

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' ">http://www.ZapWizard.com
The opinions expressed above do not represent the views of Advanced Micro Devices or any of their affiliates.

Me too! I think a CPU comparison would be very interesting.

I also agree that AMDs designers and engineers deserve an award for making a product that shouts its presance so well without much help



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A64 3200+ on S754 Shuttle System (Clawhammer 1MB). 1GB DDR400 CAS 2.5 Memory, SATA 120GB HDD @ 7200rpm.
GeforceGT 6800 Graphics / 256MB and a massive copper heat pipe cooler that I had to cut parts out of my case to fit in....

Well Hyper-Threading can actualy reduce gaming performance, and no game to my knowledge supports it, so most learned gamers would know to disable it.

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AMD64 3500+ Newcastle
Asus A8V Deluxe
2x512mb DDR400
ATI X850 Pro @ X850 XT
NEC 3500 16x DVD
470W Enermax Noisetaker
Viewsonic VP171b 17" 8ms LCD