Mass market game hardware
(Visited 7097 times) Game talk
Aug 032008
The guys at Unity have posted hardware stats for their web users, in a manner akin to how Valve publishes stats for theirs. The results may be surprising to folks still used to the core gamer market.
Among the key things:
- The single most popular video card, at 12% of installs, is the Intel 945.
- Dual Core CPUs are common — like, 44%.
- 1/4 of the machines run at DX7 level, and ~70% support 2.0 shaders.
- But almost 4% still run in software mode.
- 90% or so have graphics pixel fillrates of 2.0GP/s or less. That’s basically like a Radeon x1600, a card which sells on Amazon mostly used for between $45 and $120.
- Almost 80% are running without a DX10 card and without Vista; only 2.6% can even use DX10 (since it requires both).
It’s worth bearing in mind that Unity likely still isn’t as casual as the true mass market, despite their good penetration (this data had about a million users in it), since it requires a plugin install.
This speaks, of course, to designing for everywhere.
8 Responses to “Mass market game hardware”
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It’s not just that…
Moore’s Law is breaking. Not because the number of transistors per chip aren’t doubling every 18 months. But because people are buying smaller/cheaper computers… such as the iPhone or Eee PC.
These smaller/cheaper computers also have smaller screens, fewer pixels, smaller/no keyboard, and alternate IO. The Unity and Valve stats don’t reflect this info.
How many of the dual core machines are really just hyper-threaded single-core machines?
I think you’ve got a point. I suspect that Unity counted hyperthreading as dual-core. Valve seems to notice the difference because they actually have more single core, fewer dual cores, and more quad-cores (59%/27%/4%) compared to unity’s single/dual/quad numbers (55%/44%/1%).
Which means, as a guestimate, the number of dual-core casuals is 15%-20%.
Matthew: I don’t have hard data for that right now, but it’s true that Pentium4 is the most popular CPU at the moment (24%), so some part of dual-core accounts for HT CPUs. It is followed by Core2 (15%) and Athlon 64 (12%), which are not using hyper-threading.
Moore’s Law isn’t breaking, basically, home computers have been “good enough” for around 7 or 8 years. That’s around the time when I stopped getting a new PC every 2 years. I think my last desktop lasted around 6 years. The new, skinny machines aren’t the problem either, again, its the “good enough” requirement, only moving smaller and cheaper.
The big myth was that games drove PC purchases. Actually, games would accelerate a purchase by 6 months, or maybe a year, that we were going to make regardless. Now, with no compelling reason to upgrade, most people only replace computers when they mechanically fail.
What is real fun is to look at the “90th percentile” and “99th percentile computers” – what is the spec of the machine that would cover 90 percent or more of the audience – they are impressively unimpressive. And, if you are going to build for the mass PC market (which is much, much bigger than consoles), that is where you’ve got to aim.
Back in the early 90’s, developers would assume that computers only lasted 3 years. They could do this because (a) people had a reason to upgrade, and (b) the market was growing so quickly that there were no old computers around, and (c) there notebook and mininotebook categories were very small compared to desktops.
A PC lifepsan now seems to be 8-ish years.
The trick for game developers now is to create a game that runs on an 8 year-old computer, while still delivering a noticably better experience (aka: better graphics, etc.) to people with the latest.
Now compare these specs with the minimum specs for Age of Conan. (Heck, turns out the computers at work can’t even load Conan’s webpage, had to get the specs from Amazon.)
You could argue that they were chasing the hardcore market, but an MMO needs to target a larger group if it wants to break even, or it needs to be made very cheaply with a small team.
Raph, you could use your contacts to get data about more casual users, for the collective wellness.
What hardware that moms that play Tetris online are using?
The folks at Three Rings appear to be open about they data, releasing even financial information, so maybe they would not mind to share the hardware configuration of Puzzle Pirates users.