The latest update to the hardware survey results on the Steam PC game download site shows that Microsoft"s Windows 7 OS is now being used by over half of all of Steam"s users that have some sort of Windows OS installed on their gaming rig. The hardware survey page shows that Windows 7 in its 64-bit version is being used by 40.88 percent of Steam users that chose to participate in the survey in April 2011. The regular, 32-bit, version of Windows 7 is being used by 10.76 percent of Steam hardware survey participants. (The percentages are for Windows users only and do not take Mac users into account).
That means that Windows 7 is installed and being used by over 51 percent of all Steam users who chose to allow Steam to access their PC hardware specs. The 32-bit version of Windows XP, an OS that is over 10 years old, is still being used by a fair fraction of Steam hardware survey users. The latest survey results showed that 22.07 percent of its participants had that OS still installed.
The number of PCs that can run DirectX 11 games are still in the low range, according to the survey. Just 5.6 percent of all PC game rigs can run DirectX 11 games with their hardware, compared to a whopping 56.36 percent of PC systems that can run the lower end DirectX10 games. Steam gamers still prefer Nvidia graphics cards in their PCs; the survey shows that 59.11 percent of PC rigs have an Nvidia graphics solution inside compared to 32.98 percent for ATI (AMD), 6.22 percent for Intel-based graphics and 1.69 percent for other graphics solutions.
Another result of the survey shows that more and more PC owners have processors with four CPU cores. The latest data from the survey shows that 41.39 percent of participants have four CPU cores in their gaming rigs. Another 49.11 percent of survey participants show two CPU cores in their PCs. For Mac users, the survey shows that Steam players prefer playing games on MacBookPro laptops with 47.28 percent of Steam users shown as using the laptop for Steam activities. Second place in the survey went to iMac users with 30.72 percent.