I was pretty startled to see this.
Other interesting tidbits: almost a quarter of the Steam users now are on quad core, and over 80% now have multicore. That’s pretty mind blowing.
Wasn’t it less than a year ago that most Steam users were running pretty anemic systems?
Headline is wrong; 25% are on windows 7; of those 60% (15% of the total) are on windows 7 64 bit.
Windows Version
Windows XP 32 bit
44.77%
[LEFT] 
Windows XP 32 bit
(-3.20%) 44.77%
Windows Vista 32 bit
(-0.27%) 20.71%
Windows 7 64 bit
(+2.45%) 15.61%
[IMG]http://cdn.store.steampowered.com/public/images/trans.gif[/IMG]
Windows Vista 64 bit
(+0.81%) 10.00%
[IMG]http://cdn.store.steampowered.com/public/images/trans.gif[/IMG]
Windows 7
(+0.02%) 7.45%
Windows XP 64 bit
(+0.19%) 0.64%
Windows 2003 64 bit
(+0.04%) 0.64%
Windows 2000
(-0.01%) 0.10%
Other
(-0.03%) 0.08%
[/LEFT]
64-bit = > 4 gig ram. That’s the headline point that’s selling Win 7 64, since at this point there is no reason to move laterally into Vista 64.
Oops, my bad. Can’t change the head.
Still, 25% on Win7 after less than four months. And Windows XP now in the minority, behind Vista + Win7. That’s still a sea change.
That’s with a 2:1 ratio in favour of 64-bit over 32-bit too, which is definitely a major shift compared to Vista, where it’s 2:1 ratio in favour of 32-bit, and this is probably the first bit of hard proof of that shift that I’ve seen.
I’m kind of surprised ATI isn’t more popular though, given the recent long stretch where they were extremely competitive with the 48xx models.
Considering that this data is derived from a population of compulsive upgraders, who will happily buy whatever shiny pre-built box they can lay their hands on (with its shiny pre-installed operating system), the results really aren’t that surprising.
LOL I actually thought Steam was doing a sale, giving 25% off to Windows 7 64-bit users from the thread title.
We’re at the point where PC games are going to be more impressive than console games, for the foreseeable future. I wonder if this will result in a shift back to PC gaming for a few years? There’s some serious anti-piracy shit coming down the pipeline that just may work – if it does, it could be quite the resurgence. Those stats show a pretty big amount of available power.
Under the "Video Card Description " the HD4800 is the second most popular but until that genaration the 8xxx an 9xxx series from NVidia were way more popular. ATI has the opportunity to gain even more ground with the HD5xxx , it appears on the list but very few, since the DX11 cards from NVidia won’t hit until march apparently.
Ding ding ding. While the upgrade to Win7 64 from any 32 bit OS is a bitch (as in, do a fresh install!), the ability to break through the 3 GB barrier is every gamer’s dream – despite the fact that most of us really don’t need it.
Such as? Just curious. Is this “new shit” security going to cripple our machines again, or is this much cooler than that?
What might that be?
Windows 7 is a real winner by Microsoft.
I assume a lot of people waited for 7 before upgrading since Vista was shit.
I have my original XP installation still (dual boot) but haven’t booted into it once since I have 7.
I went with the 64 bit edition so my rig is as future “save” as possible for now.
Everything I play runs fine.
XP is on its last legs so people had to jump to something more recent and that was 7.
In hindsight I should have gotten a Quadcore instead of the Dual-Core I have now though (E 8500).
I plan to upgrade it later this year (before they disappear due to all the i5 and i7 ones).
The HD 4870 I have is still decent enough for now.
Yes, and tell Microsoft about it so they can stop thinking that GFWL does anything whatsoever to inconvenience pirates more than the consumers.
Nothing that can’t and will be cracked.
The industry should invest that money into worthwhile extras in the retail boxes instead (cloth maps, big manuals, added figurines).
The issue isn’t “can’t” but “how long”. In this case, the “how long” will be many months at a minimum, and require significantly more than simply adding some NOPs to an exe.
As long as it’s not intrusive and “draconic,” that sounds fantastic. Let’s hope it works!
You know that those guys can emulate hardware dongles with software or run WoW servers they reverse engineered right?
That’s a bit more difficult than using a Hex Editor and put some JMPs somewhere.
Sounds complicated. I bet 1 in 4 legitimate customers will be inconvenienced by it.