Mac takes 8% of Steam usage share, Windows 7 passes XP

[Matthew DeCarlo]

It didn't take long for Windows 7 to pass Vista on Steam, but XP-powered machines represented a majority of those running Windows until last month. Although the decade-old operating system still clung to 33.44% of the share (down 4.81%), it was finally outpaced by Windows 7, which accounted for 35.92% of users on Steam.

Windows gamers are not only quickly shifting to Windows 7, but also 64-bit operating systems. There are over two times more Windows 7 64-bit users than 32-bit, which is the exact opposite for Windows Vista, and there are virtually no 64-bit XP users.

Meanwhile, Vista commanded a quickly declining 21.61%, and Windows' share as a whole plummeted 8.43% from April following the launch of Steam for Mac. Of the new OS X users, 1.4% were on Leopard and 7.06% ran Snow Leopard.

It'll be interesting to see how the divide looks between Windows and Mac machines over the coming months. For instance, how many Mac users will bail after briefly using the service, and how many will get their friends hooked on Team Fortress 2?

You can read Steam's complete hardware survey here, which breaks down information about users' core components, including processors, graphics, storage drives, network speed, and display resolution.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/39198-mac-takes-8-of-steam-usage-share-windows-7-passes-xp.html

 

[gobbybobby]

Well I am still on Vista, thats becuase I been Skint for almost a year. if it aint broke don't replace it. I still run most games on MAX settings. So my rig should last till end of year (untill Crysis 2 come out )

 

[TomSEA]

Multi GPU systems only account for 1.8% of users. There was someone arguing in the Geforce vs. Radeon comparison article from yesterday about dual nVidia cards and how they were better than sliced bread or something along those lines. Then many others quickly pointed out that people who are running dual cards is an extreme minority.

I think these stats bear that out.

 

[dustin_ds3000]

wow Intel has is 69.48.% of cpus on steam and nvidia has 61.88% and ATI only has 30.92%

 

[FrostBolt]

I hit cancel instead of submit on my hardware survey because it detected my hardware incorrectly. Not sure how accurate their results are...

 

[Relic]

Couple surprising statistics here, one being how fast Windows 7 overtook Vista & XP. I would have however imagined a higher adoption rate of 64bit Windows 7 over 32bit. The Mac usage stats seems about right I'd say and it wouldn't shock me if it eventually climbed into the lower teens given more time. But did Windows share really plummet here? Seems more like the Steam user base just grew as a whole more in the OSX department since it is now available. Also the DX11 share is tiny compared to DX10.

@dustin I would guess that the average gamer lags a couple generations behind in upgrades. However the recent stats still show AMD at least declining while Intel is slightly growing =/ .

 

[Route44]

I'm actually suprised AMD had such a percentage of cpus reported; I'd thought it be lower. And, no, I am in no way bashing AMD. For the gamer they have very good bang for the buck offerings.

Also, the dual core processors appear to rule quite handily and the percentages while not suprising I would have thought the quads would have been a little stronger.

Interesting on the Windows 7 64-bit having a 2 to 1 showing over the 32-bit 7.

 

[princeton]

frostbolt said:
I hit cancel instead of submit on my hardware survey because it detected my hardware incorrectly. Not sure how accurate their results are...

I have never had a case of it detecting incorrectly on any of my machines. If anything I think it's something wrong with your machine,

 

[matrix86]

gobbybobby said:
Well I am still on Vista, thats becuase I been Skint for almost a year. if it aint broke don't replace it. I still run most games on MAX settings. So my rig should last till end of year (untill Crysis 2 come out )

Your Vista may be fine, but I know more people who had issues with it than people who didn't. Hence: Windows 7.

Anywho, I can see Mac climbing this list as more and more Mac users realize this is now available to them. It'll be interesting to see where this ends up.

 

[Deso]

Route44 said:
I'm actually surprised AMD had such a percentage of cpus reported; I'd thought it be lower. And, no, I am in no way bashing AMD. For the gamer they have very good bang for the buck offerings.

Also, the dual core processors appear to rule quite handily and the percentages while not suprising I would have thought the quads would have been a little stronger.

Interesting on the Windows 7 64-bit having a 2 to 1 showing over the 32-bit 7.

I was surprised as well that AMD has such a large share of cpus, but I belive this is because A LOT of users play games on laptops where I belive AMD has the bigger share for gaming laptops

 

[Deso]

princeton said:

frostbolt said:
I hit cancel instead of submit on my hardware survey because it detected my hardware incorrectly. Not sure how accurate their results are...

I have never had a case of it detecting incorrectly on any of my machines. If anything I think it's something wrong with your machine,

Yea I agree, you must have changed hardware and not uninstalled drivers properly, so the Steam hardware scanner detected traces of your oldhardware

 

[FrostBolt]

Deso said:

princeton said:

frostbolt said:
I hit cancel instead of submit on my hardware survey because it detected my hardware incorrectly. Not sure how accurate their results are...

I have never had a case of it detecting incorrectly on any of my machines. If anything I think it's something wrong with your machine,

Yea I agree, you must have changed hardware and not uninstalled drivers properly, so the Steam hardware scanner detected traces of your oldhardware

It didn't detect my crossfire. It said I have only one GPU, but my ATI Catalyst Control Center says I have crossfire and shows my GPUs. Device Manager in Windows shows my graphics adapters also. I can enable/disable it in control center and see the difference in performance, so I know it's working.

 

[red1776]

I have never had a case of it detecting incorrectly on any of my machines. If anything I think it's something wrong with your machine,

possibly not princeton. I noticed the same thing and contacted Steam when I noticed that CODMW2 only used 2 of my 4 GPU's, and then ran their hardware detector and it did not even see CrossfireX. This was the response i received yesterday.

Hello,

A staff member has replied to your question:

Hello Greg, Thank you for contacting Steam Support. Thank you for taking the time to report this issue. We are aware of the problem with Steam not detecting crossfire properly in the hardware survey. For assistance with your Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 issue please contact Activision support: Title: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Link: http://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=3991-EOAV-1596 If you have any further questions, please let us know - we will be happy to assist you.

It also detected something else in my system incorrectly (don't remember what it was at the moment) so they obviously have some tweaking to do on the survey.

 

[gwailo247]

Its ironic that they were giving Portal away to Mac (and Windows) users in honor of the launch, I wonder how many got the irony.

 

[captaincranky]

wow Intel has is 69.48.% of cpus on steam and nvidia has 61.88% and ATI only has 30.92%

I know what you mean, but you might consider rephrasing it anyway. At first glance, it seems to add up to 162.28%.

 

[dividebyzero]

The Bear Stearns school of accounting

 

[Deso]

captaincranky said:

wow Intel has is 69.48.% of cpus on steam and nvidia has 61.88% and ATI only has 30.92%

I know what you mean, but you might consider rephrasing it anyway. At first glance, it seems to add up to 162.28%.

Actually it's correct
Nvidia does not produce CPUS
It should be obvious when he starts mentioning NVIDIA and ATI that he went over to talking about the graphics card share and not CPU share.

 

[dividebyzero]

It's humour Deso, and a light urging to differentiate two seperate statistical groupings. You'll notice that cap'n starts his post with "I know what you mean, but you might consider rephrasing it anyway"

 

[Route44]

The Bear Stearns school of accounting

Now that's funny.