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Single Core CPUs Still RuleThey're not dead yet |
By Alexandru Pancescu, Hardware Editor
6th of August 2007, 08:00 GMT
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Gamers like to have the latest and the best hardware parts they can get their hands on, money permitting, of course. So the latest survey from the game producer Valve comes as a really big hit as most Steam users reported that they are still using single core processors for all their gaming needs. The survey took place among almost a million gamers worldwide, about a third of the total persons using Valve's Steam multiplayer system.
The
survey was centered around several points of interest like Internet connectivity, general hardware platform, computer system memory, graphics cards and video API. The results speak for themselves as most gamers reported mainstream hardware components, few of them having high end processors or video cards, while the Internet connectivity is generally above average as most (32.54 percent) of them are using a broadband connection with 2Mbit/s and an impressive 11.12 percent are having access to a 10Mbit/s link. Like any hardware centered survey, this one too asked the question "AMD or Intel?" and the numbers were very balanced. Intel still is king among gamers, having been adopted by 53.19 percent of the users, while AMD is a little less popular, being used by 43.80 percent of the gamers. From the Intel crowd, most users still own an older Pentium 4 processor and the number of gamers going for single core processors was very high (76.06 percent). Among the AMD fans, almost 22 percent own processors clocked at frequencies between 2 and 2.3GHz, while in the Intel world, over a third of the users went for higher speeds like 2.3 to 3.29GHz.
Computer memory is another hot subject for all gamers as it is very important for a good gaming experience, but the survey showed that most computers are equipped with 1GB of RAM( 45.02 percent), while only 23.81 percent of gamers invested in 2GB of memory, while the percentage of gamers using less than 1GB or more of 2GB of memory is very low. There is the "AMD vs Intel" war on the processors' side and there is the "ATI vs Nvidia" war on the graphics cards' side, where more than half of the gamers use Nvidia-based hardware with ATI users counting for only 35.47 percent. Intel integrated graphics solutions entered the Valve survey too, going on the third place, while the sorry excuses of graphics chips made by SiS and VIA were very low.
When talking about a certain generation of graphics chips, most users voted for the GeForce 6600 (about 7 percent), while the GeForce 7600 took the second place and the GeForce 8800 was the third with 4.32 percent of the votes. The highest end ATI based card, the Radeon HD 2900XT, did not even make it, because it has some bugs. On the graphics API front, most users opted for DirectX 9, the OpenGL API being liked less. This may change in the near future as the idSoftware games will use it more and more.
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