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Steam (Half-Life 2) Users Hardware Survey Results

pm

Elite Member Mobile Devices
Like a lemming I drove over to Best Buy and forked over a fair bit of cash for my copy of Half-Life 2. I'm struggling to get Steam to register the thing so that I can play it currently.

One thing that may be of interest to people on here - it was to me anyway - is a survey they take of people's machines.

The results are viewable for me http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html.

I thought the video card and CPU survey results were pretty interesting.


Now I'm going back to trying to get Valve to let me run Half-Life 2. One would have thought that Valve would have adequately tested their required registration system before they decided to release the game.
 
If anything, this part should tell Valve (and everyone else!) which medium to choose for future releases:

DriveType:
69,692 7.04% Undetermined
168,138 16.98% CD-Rom
752,280 75.98% DVD
 
Originally posted by: pm
Like a lemming I drove over to Best Buy and forked over a fair bit of cash for my copy of Half-Life 2. I'm struggling to get Steam to register the thing so that I can play it currently.

One thing that may be of interest to people on here - it was to me anyway - is a survey they take of people's machines.

The results are viewable for me http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html.

I thought the video card and CPU survey results were pretty interesting.


Now I'm going back to trying to get Valve to let me run Half-Life 2. One would have thought that Valve would have adequately tested their required registration system before they decided to release the game.

You have to register it to play? Screw that...looks like I'll pass on this one.
 
Originally posted by: tenchim
If anything, this part should tell Valve (and everyone else!) which medium to choose for future releases:

DriveType:
69,692 7.04% Undetermined
168,138 16.98% CD-Rom
752,280 75.98% DVD

DingDingDing!

So true.


And i dislike the CPU speed thing...using GHz only gives a poor poll.
 
Originally posted by: Insane3D
Originally posted by: pm
Like a lemming I drove over to Best Buy and forked over a fair bit of cash for my copy of Half-Life 2. I'm struggling to get Steam to register the thing so that I can play it currently.

One thing that may be of interest to people on here - it was to me anyway - is a survey they take of people's machines.

The results are viewable for me http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html.

I thought the video card and CPU survey results were pretty interesting.


Now I'm going back to trying to get Valve to let me run Half-Life 2. One would have thought that Valve would have adequately tested their required registration system before they decided to release the game.

You have to register it to play? Screw that...looks like I'll pass on this one.

Yes you have to register ONLINE,so people without internet can't even play the game.:disgust:
 
Originally posted by: Budman
Originally posted by: Insane3D
Originally posted by: pm
Like a lemming I drove over to Best Buy and forked over a fair bit of cash for my copy of Half-Life 2. I'm struggling to get Steam to register the thing so that I can play it currently.

One thing that may be of interest to people on here - it was to me anyway - is a survey they take of people's machines.

The results are viewable for me http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html.

I thought the video card and CPU survey results were pretty interesting.


Now I'm going back to trying to get Valve to let me run Half-Life 2. One would have thought that Valve would have adequately tested their required registration system before they decided to release the game.

You have to register it to play? Screw that...looks like I'll pass on this one.

Yes you have to register ONLINE,so people without internet can't even play the game.:disgust:


I can understand them trying to fight piracy, but I shouldn't have to divulge my info to them to play a game I paid for. Looks like I'll have to let this one be one I don't ever buy...shame too...looks like it will be a great game.

:|
 
Registration is simple. Not much information at all. Just Create Account Name, email address, and password. That's it.
 
Yeah, but I have another problem. This HL2 coupon I got from a 9600XT purchase almost 6-months ago is not working. Reason? The CD activation key is already being used or was already registered. WTF??!! I just scratched the darned thing to get the activation code and now this. Checking their website, Valve says that Sierra 'may have' produced duplicate CD keys and that if your key is already used, you have to send it to them and pay an additional $10 for "processing" so they can give you another key, or you can go bug whoever made your video card. This sucks.
 
Something from the survey I found very odd:

OpenGL 584,624 58.36 %
Direct3D 177,302 17.70 %

I had thought HL2 ran in D3D by default? Am I mistaken?
 
Originally posted by: batmanuel
I feel kinda sorry for the 11% of HL2 players that are trying to get it to run on their GeForce 4 MX cards.
Did you have a look@the Game Screen Width stats? :laugh:
 
16x12 2xAA, 2xAF. very pretty and very very very good. but i must say what's up with the 20-30 seconds load times between map segments?

 
Originally posted by: Somniferum
Something from the survey I found very odd:

OpenGL 584,624 58.36 %
Direct3D 177,302 17.70 %

I had thought HL2 ran in D3D by default? Am I mistaken?


Yeah that doesn't seem rigtht. Is this a survey that people filled out, or are they getting this straight from system info.

Because what's really scary is under Game Renderer
Unknown 178,118 17.70 %
How could they not know what's rendering their own game?

And they had 86 people with below 200Mhz cpu's!!! Yikes.
 
Originally posted by: Dug
Yeah that doesn't seem rigtht. Is this a survey that people filled out, or are they getting this straight from system info.

Because what's really scary is under Game Renderer
Unknown 178,118 17.70 %
How could they not know what's rendering their own game?

I believe this is aggregate data based on system specs that Steam collects automatically during installation. If so, "unknown" could include things like proprietary drivers, roll-your-own Omega/DNA type drivers, etc. But still, you'd think it would know if D3D, OpenGL or software was rendering the game....

If it is possible to run the game in OpenGL or D3D, I wonder how one would change the renderer?
 
I was a bit frustrated when I wrote the top post. I did get it registered about 30 minutes later. They don't ask for a lot of information - an email address and then the CD code and that's about it. The game is very, very good. I am certainly having fun and am impressed.

In any case, back to the survey, one has to wonder about the 4 people that logged into Steam with Connectix CPU (a PC-emulator for the Mac). I somehow can't imagine that their Counter-Strike or Half-Life 2 experience is going to be all that great.
 
You have to remember this system survey has been on steam for quite a while now, much longer than HL2 has been out. All those people with sucky specs have either since upgraded, or aren't trying to play HL2.
 
Wow, they were not joking about the percentage of people on the market who buy expensive top of the line graphic cards. These are just only the people who even bought HL2 expecting it to be taxing on hardware.

I think everybody who owns a 400 dollar video card is either from Anand.com and Tom's.
 
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