Vista may have produced record sales for Microsoft, but whom exactly is fronting the bill for all those sales? If you have ever run STEAM, you know all about Valve's routine hardware surveys. If they are to be believed at all, it isn't the gamers who are gobbling Vista up. According to them, out of 330,000 unique profiles, Vista accounted for a meager 5% of those. Of course, XP remains the dominant OS at 93%. Of all people interested in new technologies, many developers speculated that Vista's support for DX10 would make it the de-facto gaming OS in short time. Obviously that is not the case, at least currently.
Interestingly, other technologies that have yet to give large advantages to games, such as dual core processors, have been picked up quite a bit. 21.71% of those surveyed had multi-processor or multi-core systems, and even more interesting was the AMD/Intel split. Despite Intel's dominance overall worldwide, on these sampled gamers it was almost a direct split: 51.37% Intel and 48.63% AMD. The statistics overall are very interesting, and a group of 330,000 is fairly decent for any survey. Despite how annoying STEAM can be, it is interesting to see it being used in ways like this.