As a former Windows PC owner/user, I can say with certainty, there are a few reasons to run MS Windows. Damn Few. And becoming fewer every passing day.
There's really no reason to use Windows once all the major gaming dev comes to Mac.
Maybe if Apple fixes their OpenGL drivers...as it stands I will probably be playing most of my Starcraft 2 in Windows, I get 60% of the performance in OS X.
As a former Windows PC owner/user, I can say with certainty, there are a few reasons to run MS Windows. Damn Few. And becoming fewer every passing day.
Wasn't the official word from Valve that the official release was this Wednesday? Now all we're getting is two games?
First they delay the official release from April to mid-May, now the official release is just a public beta and who know when we'll get the full thing. I wish Valve would stop jerking us around like this.
I wish Valve would stop jerking us around like this.
Before you start feeling too persecuted, remember Valve Time. They jerk everybody around. So they really are treating Mac and Windows users equally. It may not be what we wanted, but it is what we (unknowingly) asked for.
You think it pertinent to criticise Adobe for poor Mac support when talking about Flash, but for you to treat your own Apple customers to third-rate graphics goes beyond the pale.
Each Mac should have the very latest generation GPU fitted at launch (not cards that are a couple of generations behind Generic PC counterparts- Top of the range iMac's and MacPro's should be GPU upgradeable and we need better, timely drivers.
SLI/Crossover? I don't need it for the games I play, but many, many younger Mac users would love this tech available in a Mac.
While I am thankful Valve has done this, I don't think the Mac is still a viable platform. As fat as I know, there isn't a common API like Direct X that can hook into the deeper layers of OS X. There isn't a huge Mac market if you break down the numbers. Apple doesn't allow overclocking, frequent video driver updates nor do they allow graphic cards to be swapped in and out.
You can't easily overclock or update game consoles with better hardware either, and those platforms seem to be doing pretty well overall.
The Steam Hardware Survey shows that the median hardware is not today's high end but technology that's a few years old now.
The most popular screen resolution is 1280x1024.
As an aside, for all the complaining we've heard in these forums about OS X lacking SLI/Crossfire support, it turns out that only about 2% of Steam users are using it.
SLI/Crossover? I don't need it for the games I play, but many, many younger Mac users would love this tech available in a Mac.
And I'm assuming you're the type to pay $3,000 for a Mac Pro? Since that would be the only Mac that could potentially come in a SLI configuration...
Other thing is most people don't seem to care for GPU upgrades. Especially for laptop components, since no other manufacturer is offering that anyway. Besides, if you really wanted to upgrade your GPU, then you could, you'd just have to disassemble your Macbook or iMac. But I can see why you'd want something big and boxy but accessible instead just to upgrade to a newer GPU and kill your battery life
Besides, don't top end GPU's cost at least $400? At that price, you could probably afford to buy a new Macbook Pro or iMac when they come out and sell the old one since they retain their value so well
But by now I should've realized your a troll, because OpenGL 4.0 has only been out for a few months, not nearly enough time for Apple to plan for production units to have that sort of capability. Give me a break, that's the least thing that they could be doing wrong
Wow. The gameporting team has already done great versions of these in crossover wrappers. I played Portal and the entire Half-Life 2 series through close to 2 years ago on a 2006 Macbook Pro with graphics set to medium.
Most pre-2009 are very playable using Crossover in OSX on modern Apple computers with graphics cards.
I assume Valve is porting in a very similar way to the gameporting team (maybe even using crossover),and will stick to mainly 2- and 3- year old games to make up for the inefficiencies involved.
I thought it was kind of amusing that the gameporting team versions of Bioshock and Call of Duty work way better on OSX than the "official" Mac version... Really these companies are just trying to make a quick and easy buck. They know that gaming sucks so bad on Apple computers that they can throw a 3 year-old bone to us and lots of Mac users will jump all over it...
Anyways, with the 2 generation old, rebranded graphics in the new Macbook Pros, and no DirectX support in OSX, I don't think this will change too much about the mac as a gaming platform, except for people who don't mind playing with all graphics set to "low".
Wow. The gameporting team has already done great versions of these in crossover wrappers. I played Portal and the entire Half-Life 2 series through close to 2 years ago on a 2006 Macbook Pro with graphics set to medium.
Most pre-2009 are very playable using Crossover in OSX on modern Apple computers with graphics cards.
I assume Valve is porting in a very similar way to the gameporting team (maybe even using crossover),and will stick to mainly 2- and 3- year old games to make up for the inefficiencies involved.
I thought it was kind of amusing that the gameporting team versions of Bioshock and Call of Duty work way better on OSX than the "official" Mac version... Really these companies are just trying to make a quick and easy buck. They know that gaming sucks so bad on Apple computers that they can throw a 3 year-old bone to us and lots of Mac users will jump all over it...
Anyways, with the 2 generation old, rebranded graphics in the new Macbook Pros, and no DirectX support in OSX, I don't think this will change too much about the mac as a gaming platform, except for people who don't mind playing with all graphics set to "low".
This might have been overlooked in the hubbub, but not only is Valve bringing over the established hit games like Portal, Team Fortress 2, and the Half-Life series, but they have also made a public commitment to stay in sync across future Mac and Windows releases, starting with Portal 2 later this year. It was announced at GDC in March.
By the way, there's no Crossover, Cider, WINE, or other middleware involved in the Valve ported titles. These are natively developed apps using the Source codebase and several new subsystems to support OS X, one of which is the OpenGL graphics module that I worked on.
This might have been overlooked in the hubbub, but not only is Valve bringing over the established hit games like Portal, Team Fortress 2, and the Half-Life series, but they have also made a public commitment to stay in sync across future Mac and Windows releases, starting with Portal 2 later this year. It was announced at GDC in March.
Yeah, EA made a similar announcement a few years back, which led to about 10 different games + 10 expansion packs for world of goo and the sims being released since 2007.
OpenGL just doesn't approach DirectX for modern gaming performance, and Apple Video cards aren't powerful enough to compensate for that deficiency. Mac users who want to play current games are using BootCamp now, and will probably continue to do so rather than make the big sacrifice on graphics. Even low-graphics games like Neverwinter Nights 2 and C&C just play and look so much better on Windows 7 in Bootcamp than the OSX native versions, and Bioshock is night and day when you compare the 2...
Definitely, Steam will be great for (very) casual gamers, but that will most likely lead to a similar situation as what went down with EA - sure, the overall population of people who play games on Mac might be enough to support ports of 40-50% of Valve games, but if most of the people who play the Crysis/Call of Duty/Left for Dead/Dragon Ages of the world stick to BootCamp, then we'll continue to see games like World of Goo, The Sims, plus 3 year old games being the only ones ported...
Portal is a very fun game, but really not graphics intensive, even compared to other games using the Steam engine like half-life, so the announcement of it and it's sequel being released is actually pretty modest. Same with Team Fortress, which doesn't come remotely close to Assasin's Creed, Fallout 3, etc. when you think of long draw distances, dynamic environments, scripted elements, etc...
Anyways, for the less technically demanding games, Steam on Mac will be nice, also for Counterstrike online play, etc., but I'm not expecting anything more than an EA-type situation here...
Wondering if this will only be for US people? Is Steam for PC worldwide? Happy that there is some focus on game son the Mac, but would not be surprised yet again if this won't go outside of the US..
Yeah, EA made a similar announcement a few years back, which led to about 10 different games + 10 expansion packs for world of goo and the sims being released since 2007.
OpenGL just doesn't approach DirectX for modern gaming performance, and Apple Video cards aren't powerful enough to compensate for that deficiency. Mac users who want to play current games are using BootCamp now, and will probably continue to do so rather than make the big sacrifice on graphics. Even low-graphics games like Neverwinter Nights 2 and C&C just play and look so much better on Windows 7 in Bootcamp than the OSX native versions, and Bioshock is night and day when you compare the 2...
Definitely, Steam will be great for (very) casual gamers, but that will most likely lead to a similar situation as what went down with EA - sure, the overall population of people who play games on Mac might be enough to support ports of 40-50% of Valve games, but if most of the people who play the Crysis/Call of Duty/Left for Dead/Dragon Ages of the world stick to BootCamp, then we'll continue to see games like World of Goo, The Sims, plus 3 year old games being the only ones ported...
Portal is a very fun game, but really not graphics intensive, even compared to other games using the Steam engine like half-life, so the announcement of it and it's sequel being released is actually pretty modest. Same with Team Fortress, which doesn't come remotely close to Assasin's Creed, Fallout 3, etc. when you think of long draw distances, dynamic environments, scripted elements, etc...
Anyways, for the less technically demanding games, Steam on Mac will be nice, also for Counterstrike online play, etc., but I'm not expecting anything more than an EA-type situation here...
I think it really depends on how good of a job they've done with OpenGL support in the Source engine. If they've done a good job of it, then the performance difference shouldn't be noticeable even with the mid-level GPUs Apple uses in most of it's machines. If it's a very unoptimized port then we could be looking at performance differences on par with the Mac (cider) port of Battlefield 2142 back in '07; i.e. atrocious. Apple's current crop of mid-range or higher GPUs (GTS 330M, Radeon HD 4670, Radeon HD 4850) are perfectly capable of handling current generation games. Though the 330M is questionable as performance GPU, assuming some good optimization on the developer's part current 3D titles shouldn't be in much if any trouble on the Mac.
The difference here from EA's announcement is that Valve has gone all the way and actually brought Steam to the Mac. This is a huge step in luring other developers to the platform. The question will ultimately be how far other publishers are willing to go with this. Good Job Valve for opening the door...Let's see how many walk through it.
I think it really depends on how good of a job they've done with OpenGL support in the Source engine. If they've done a good job of it, then the performance difference shouldn't be noticeable even with the mid-level GPUs Apple uses in most of it's machines. If it's a very unoptimized port then we could be looking at performance differences on par with the Mac (cider) port of Battlefield 2142 back in '07; i.e. atrocious. Apple's current crop of mid-range or higher GPUs (GTS 330M, Radeon HD 4670, Radeon HD 4850) are perfectly capable of handling current generation games. Though the 330M is questionable as performance GPU, assuming some good optimization on the developer's part current 3D titles shouldn't be in much if any trouble on the Mac.
The difference here from EA's announcement is that Valve has gone all the way and actually brought Steam to the Mac. This is a huge step in luring other developers to the platform. The question will ultimately be how far other publishers are willing to go with this. Good Job Valve for opening the door...Let's see how many walk through it.
Again, the 330M is basically a rebranded, 3 year old GPU, and the 4850 is already over 2 years old itself. OpenGL comes nowhere close to Direct3D nowadays. Back when it was OpenGL vs DirectX 6, they were very comparable, but DirectX11 vs OpenGL 3 is really no contest. Graphics intensive games designed with DirectX10 or 11, or even 9 in mind will have to be scaled down considerably to run using OpenGL.
The other issue is that relatively very few Apple products in circulation have the above stated graphics cards. Most use either integrated graphics, or still lower power cards, usually with 128 MB of VRAM or less, which will not acceptably run current games with any sort of graphical complexity. With Apple already a relatively small gaming market, it's crazy to think that manufacturers will spend much time porting games only really playable by a small percentage of a small market... That's why EA has been reduced to porting nothing but Sims and World of Goo type games in the last couple years.
It's very telling that Valve is using Portal and Team Fortress as launch titles, instead of a current game, or even something like Half-Life 2, which is still an older game, but contains lots of scripted elements, really dynamic environments, etc. It's totally cool that we have Portal 2 to look forward to, but I think if Valve were going to go all in, they might have announced/released some more intensive/current games.
Pretty nice, even with minor glitches this could make gaming on a mac a possibility. The Source engine is incredibly flexible, and can scale from crappy low end graphics for older machines to incredible detail for those who can support it. Plus mac vs pc gaming is a great thing to hear. Valve has really tried to make Steam:Mac an all around winner, and I hope they get rewarded with customers.
Wondering if this will only be for US people? Is Steam for PC worldwide? Happy that there is some focus on game son the Mac, but would not be surprised yet again if this won't go outside of the US..
Steam for Windows is available globally. Pricing is available in a variety of local currencies but games are available in dollars for the rest of the world. I don't see why Steam for Mac will be any different.
I really think this is terrific news, but the article itself reads rather a lot like an ad:
"Valve has done something unprecedented"
Ehrm - Telltale Games has done exactly this several months ago, when they released their Monkey Island episodes for Mac - also for free for customers owning the Windows-versions? \
Disagree, besides maybe the Operating system and the amount of ram, it is pretty much high end, most people are either using a 4800 or 5800 series of ATi card, for Nvidia it is either a 8800/9800 and also a 260x video card, they are using decent processors as well.
For the primary display resolution, ah ya 1280x1024 is only around 18.8% and your forgetting the fact that over 18% have it at 1680x1050, over 10% have it at 1920x1080 and additional 5% have it at 1920x1200, I would say nearly as many people are running it at 1920x1080, if you include the 1920x1200, as they are running at 1280x1024
You can't easily overclock or update game consoles with better hardware either, and those platforms seem to be doing pretty well overall.
The Steam Hardware Survey shows that the median hardware is not today's high end but technology that's a few years old now.
The most popular screen resolution is 1280x1024.
As an aside, for all the complaining we've heard in these forums about OS X lacking SLI/Crossfire support, it turns out that only about 2% of Steam users are using it.
You're misrepresenting the Steam survey. While "the most popular" screen resolution is 1280x1024 (18.8%) more than 56% run at a resolution greater than that (including over 10% with dual monitors).
Comments
There's really no reason to use Windows once all the major gaming dev comes to Mac.
Maybe if Apple fixes their OpenGL drivers...as it stands I will probably be playing most of my Starcraft 2 in Windows, I get 60% of the performance in OS X.
As a former Windows PC owner/user, I can say with certainty, there are a few reasons to run MS Windows. Damn Few. And becoming fewer every passing day.
Windows is Doomed!
Wasn't the official word from Valve that the official release was this Wednesday? Now all we're getting is two games?
First they delay the official release from April to mid-May, now the official release is just a public beta and who know when we'll get the full thing. I wish Valve would stop jerking us around like this.
I wish Valve would stop jerking us around like this.
Before you start feeling too persecuted, remember Valve Time. They jerk everybody around. So they really are treating Mac and Windows users equally. It may not be what we wanted, but it is what we (unknowingly) asked for.
You've now had more than enough time, Apple.
You think it pertinent to criticise Adobe for poor Mac support when talking about Flash, but for you to treat your own Apple customers to third-rate graphics goes beyond the pale.
Each Mac should have the very latest generation GPU fitted at launch (not cards that are a couple of generations behind Generic PC counterparts- Top of the range iMac's and MacPro's should be GPU upgradeable and we need better, timely drivers.
SLI/Crossover? I don't need it for the games I play, but many, many younger Mac users would love this tech available in a Mac.
While I am thankful Valve has done this, I don't think the Mac is still a viable platform. As fat as I know, there isn't a common API like Direct X that can hook into the deeper layers of OS X. There isn't a huge Mac market if you break down the numbers. Apple doesn't allow overclocking, frequent video driver updates nor do they allow graphic cards to be swapped in and out.
You can't easily overclock or update game consoles with better hardware either, and those platforms seem to be doing pretty well overall.
The Steam Hardware Survey shows that the median hardware is not today's high end but technology that's a few years old now.
The most popular screen resolution is 1280x1024.
As an aside, for all the complaining we've heard in these forums about OS X lacking SLI/Crossfire support, it turns out that only about 2% of Steam users are using it.
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/
SLI/Crossover? I don't need it for the games I play, but many, many younger Mac users would love this tech available in a Mac.
And I'm assuming you're the type to pay $3,000 for a Mac Pro? Since that would be the only Mac that could potentially come in a SLI configuration...
Other thing is most people don't seem to care for GPU upgrades. Especially for laptop components, since no other manufacturer is offering that anyway. Besides, if you really wanted to upgrade your GPU, then you could, you'd just have to disassemble your Macbook or iMac. But I can see why you'd want something big and boxy but accessible instead just to upgrade to a newer GPU and kill your battery life
Besides, don't top end GPU's cost at least $400? At that price, you could probably afford to buy a new Macbook Pro or iMac when they come out and sell the old one since they retain their value so well
But by now I should've realized your a troll, because OpenGL 4.0 has only been out for a few months, not nearly enough time for Apple to plan for production units to have that sort of capability. Give me a break, that's the least thing that they could be doing wrong
Most pre-2009 are very playable using Crossover in OSX on modern Apple computers with graphics cards.
I assume Valve is porting in a very similar way to the gameporting team (maybe even using crossover),and will stick to mainly 2- and 3- year old games to make up for the inefficiencies involved.
I thought it was kind of amusing that the gameporting team versions of Bioshock and Call of Duty work way better on OSX than the "official" Mac version... Really these companies are just trying to make a quick and easy buck. They know that gaming sucks so bad on Apple computers that they can throw a 3 year-old bone to us and lots of Mac users will jump all over it...
Anyways, with the 2 generation old, rebranded graphics in the new Macbook Pros, and no DirectX support in OSX, I don't think this will change too much about the mac as a gaming platform, except for people who don't mind playing with all graphics set to "low".
Wow. The gameporting team has already done great versions of these in crossover wrappers. I played Portal and the entire Half-Life 2 series through close to 2 years ago on a 2006 Macbook Pro with graphics set to medium.
Most pre-2009 are very playable using Crossover in OSX on modern Apple computers with graphics cards.
I assume Valve is porting in a very similar way to the gameporting team (maybe even using crossover),and will stick to mainly 2- and 3- year old games to make up for the inefficiencies involved.
I thought it was kind of amusing that the gameporting team versions of Bioshock and Call of Duty work way better on OSX than the "official" Mac version... Really these companies are just trying to make a quick and easy buck. They know that gaming sucks so bad on Apple computers that they can throw a 3 year-old bone to us and lots of Mac users will jump all over it...
Anyways, with the 2 generation old, rebranded graphics in the new Macbook Pros, and no DirectX support in OSX, I don't think this will change too much about the mac as a gaming platform, except for people who don't mind playing with all graphics set to "low".
This might have been overlooked in the hubbub, but not only is Valve bringing over the established hit games like Portal, Team Fortress 2, and the Half-Life series, but they have also made a public commitment to stay in sync across future Mac and Windows releases, starting with Portal 2 later this year. It was announced at GDC in March.
By the way, there's no Crossover, Cider, WINE, or other middleware involved in the Valve ported titles. These are natively developed apps using the Source codebase and several new subsystems to support OS X, one of which is the OpenGL graphics module that I worked on.
This might have been overlooked in the hubbub, but not only is Valve bringing over the established hit games like Portal, Team Fortress 2, and the Half-Life series, but they have also made a public commitment to stay in sync across future Mac and Windows releases, starting with Portal 2 later this year. It was announced at GDC in March.
Yeah, EA made a similar announcement a few years back, which led to about 10 different games + 10 expansion packs for world of goo and the sims being released since 2007.
OpenGL just doesn't approach DirectX for modern gaming performance, and Apple Video cards aren't powerful enough to compensate for that deficiency. Mac users who want to play current games are using BootCamp now, and will probably continue to do so rather than make the big sacrifice on graphics. Even low-graphics games like Neverwinter Nights 2 and C&C just play and look so much better on Windows 7 in Bootcamp than the OSX native versions, and Bioshock is night and day when you compare the 2...
Definitely, Steam will be great for (very) casual gamers, but that will most likely lead to a similar situation as what went down with EA - sure, the overall population of people who play games on Mac might be enough to support ports of 40-50% of Valve games, but if most of the people who play the Crysis/Call of Duty/Left for Dead/Dragon Ages of the world stick to BootCamp, then we'll continue to see games like World of Goo, The Sims, plus 3 year old games being the only ones ported...
Portal is a very fun game, but really not graphics intensive, even compared to other games using the Steam engine like half-life, so the announcement of it and it's sequel being released is actually pretty modest. Same with Team Fortress, which doesn't come remotely close to Assasin's Creed, Fallout 3, etc. when you think of long draw distances, dynamic environments, scripted elements, etc...
Anyways, for the less technically demanding games, Steam on Mac will be nice, also for Counterstrike online play, etc., but I'm not expecting anything more than an EA-type situation here...
Yeah, EA made a similar announcement a few years back, which led to about 10 different games + 10 expansion packs for world of goo and the sims being released since 2007.
OpenGL just doesn't approach DirectX for modern gaming performance, and Apple Video cards aren't powerful enough to compensate for that deficiency. Mac users who want to play current games are using BootCamp now, and will probably continue to do so rather than make the big sacrifice on graphics. Even low-graphics games like Neverwinter Nights 2 and C&C just play and look so much better on Windows 7 in Bootcamp than the OSX native versions, and Bioshock is night and day when you compare the 2...
Definitely, Steam will be great for (very) casual gamers, but that will most likely lead to a similar situation as what went down with EA - sure, the overall population of people who play games on Mac might be enough to support ports of 40-50% of Valve games, but if most of the people who play the Crysis/Call of Duty/Left for Dead/Dragon Ages of the world stick to BootCamp, then we'll continue to see games like World of Goo, The Sims, plus 3 year old games being the only ones ported...
Portal is a very fun game, but really not graphics intensive, even compared to other games using the Steam engine like half-life, so the announcement of it and it's sequel being released is actually pretty modest. Same with Team Fortress, which doesn't come remotely close to Assasin's Creed, Fallout 3, etc. when you think of long draw distances, dynamic environments, scripted elements, etc...
Anyways, for the less technically demanding games, Steam on Mac will be nice, also for Counterstrike online play, etc., but I'm not expecting anything more than an EA-type situation here...
I think it really depends on how good of a job they've done with OpenGL support in the Source engine. If they've done a good job of it, then the performance difference shouldn't be noticeable even with the mid-level GPUs Apple uses in most of it's machines. If it's a very unoptimized port then we could be looking at performance differences on par with the Mac (cider) port of Battlefield 2142 back in '07; i.e. atrocious. Apple's current crop of mid-range or higher GPUs (GTS 330M, Radeon HD 4670, Radeon HD 4850) are perfectly capable of handling current generation games. Though the 330M is questionable as performance GPU, assuming some good optimization on the developer's part current 3D titles shouldn't be in much if any trouble on the Mac.
The difference here from EA's announcement is that Valve has gone all the way and actually brought Steam to the Mac. This is a huge step in luring other developers to the platform. The question will ultimately be how far other publishers are willing to go with this. Good Job Valve for opening the door...Let's see how many walk through it.
I think it really depends on how good of a job they've done with OpenGL support in the Source engine. If they've done a good job of it, then the performance difference shouldn't be noticeable even with the mid-level GPUs Apple uses in most of it's machines. If it's a very unoptimized port then we could be looking at performance differences on par with the Mac (cider) port of Battlefield 2142 back in '07; i.e. atrocious. Apple's current crop of mid-range or higher GPUs (GTS 330M, Radeon HD 4670, Radeon HD 4850) are perfectly capable of handling current generation games. Though the 330M is questionable as performance GPU, assuming some good optimization on the developer's part current 3D titles shouldn't be in much if any trouble on the Mac.
The difference here from EA's announcement is that Valve has gone all the way and actually brought Steam to the Mac. This is a huge step in luring other developers to the platform. The question will ultimately be how far other publishers are willing to go with this. Good Job Valve for opening the door...Let's see how many walk through it.
Again, the 330M is basically a rebranded, 3 year old GPU, and the 4850 is already over 2 years old itself. OpenGL comes nowhere close to Direct3D nowadays. Back when it was OpenGL vs DirectX 6, they were very comparable, but DirectX11 vs OpenGL 3 is really no contest. Graphics intensive games designed with DirectX10 or 11, or even 9 in mind will have to be scaled down considerably to run using OpenGL.
The other issue is that relatively very few Apple products in circulation have the above stated graphics cards. Most use either integrated graphics, or still lower power cards, usually with 128 MB of VRAM or less, which will not acceptably run current games with any sort of graphical complexity. With Apple already a relatively small gaming market, it's crazy to think that manufacturers will spend much time porting games only really playable by a small percentage of a small market... That's why EA has been reduced to porting nothing but Sims and World of Goo type games in the last couple years.
It's very telling that Valve is using Portal and Team Fortress as launch titles, instead of a current game, or even something like Half-Life 2, which is still an older game, but contains lots of scripted elements, really dynamic environments, etc. It's totally cool that we have Portal 2 to look forward to, but I think if Valve were going to go all in, they might have announced/released some more intensive/current games.
Wondering if this will only be for US people? Is Steam for PC worldwide? Happy that there is some focus on game son the Mac, but would not be surprised yet again if this won't go outside of the US..
Steam for Windows is available globally. Pricing is available in a variety of local currencies but games are available in dollars for the rest of the world. I don't see why Steam for Mac will be any different.
"Valve has done something unprecedented"
Ehrm - Telltale Games has done exactly this several months ago, when they released their Monkey Island episodes for Mac - also for free for customers owning the Windows-versions?
The Steam Hardware Survey shows that the median hardware is not today's high end but technology that's a few years old now.
The most popular screen resolution is 1280x1024.
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/
Disagree, besides maybe the Operating system and the amount of ram, it is pretty much high end, most people are either using a 4800 or 5800 series of ATi card, for Nvidia it is either a 8800/9800 and also a 260x video card, they are using decent processors as well.
For the primary display resolution, ah ya 1280x1024 is only around 18.8% and your forgetting the fact that over 18% have it at 1680x1050, over 10% have it at 1920x1080 and additional 5% have it at 1920x1200, I would say nearly as many people are running it at 1920x1080, if you include the 1920x1200, as they are running at 1280x1024
You can't easily overclock or update game consoles with better hardware either, and those platforms seem to be doing pretty well overall.
The Steam Hardware Survey shows that the median hardware is not today's high end but technology that's a few years old now.
The most popular screen resolution is 1280x1024.
As an aside, for all the complaining we've heard in these forums about OS X lacking SLI/Crossfire support, it turns out that only about 2% of Steam users are using it.
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/
I can't let this slide...
You're misrepresenting the Steam survey. While "the most popular" screen resolution is 1280x1024 (18.8%) more than 56% run at a resolution greater than that (including over 10% with dual monitors).