steam hardware survey

steam is running a hardware survey and posting the results. might be a good way to get an idea of what folks out there are running nowadays....

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

Yeah I first participated in the survey around the time that I installed HL2 in 2004

God, Steam was awful in 2004 too Trying to use it on a 56k modem, it would often busy-loop and use 100% of your (single core) CPU time...

As a side note Norman, you might be interested in comparing installed base to unity.

Note for the time being Steam reports the most common video card is NV GTX 970 (3.54%), while 750 is less common (2.56%). Considering the 970 can easily be 300 bucks I'm inclined to assert steam samples mostly core gamers demographics (which is known to to). It could be debated whatever this is the best for you.

... steam samples mostly core gamers demographics (which is known to to). It could be debated whatever this is the best for you.

QFE -- Steam's hardware survey is a great resource, but one which may not represent your target market/demographics. Its not representative of casual gamers or of those who spend even less time than that playing games. It also tends to skew away from laptops, while laptops are the largest part of the PC market today and have been for several years.

Unity is a better source for casual gamers, though there's a a strong influence towards core-gamers too, because of the versatility of Unity. You can find stats from the popular web browsers as well -- I don't think they'll say anything about specific video card hardware (probably just driver name), but if your game is happy to work on, say, relatively modern integrated graphics and anything better is just gravy, they're a good source for things like # CPUs, CPU type/speed, installed RAM, # displays, primary display size and resolution. The browser stats are probably as good a source as you'll find for representing the full breadth of the PC install base.