Steam hardware survey reveals a shocking truth hidden in plain sight

Josh Klint wrote:

Amazingly, more people are using 10+ year old GPUs than are using modern high-end cards.

I'm one of them. New GPUs are too expensive, and the new features of RT and ML don't convince me at all.

I do not plan to buy a dGPU ever again. Just look at those huge xx90 GPUs which even need crutches to hold their heavy weight.
It's ridiculous and outdated. Steam driven locomotives feel more modern.

I want APU instead, merging CPU and GPU to a single chip to save costs. Adding memory as well like Apple does would be nice too.

But what do i get? 4000$ AI workstations. No thanks. I'll wait for a better offer.

If i would be a console gamer, i would not buy a PS6 at probably 1000$ either.
I would keep my PS5 and demand from devs to max it out, instead relying on new hardware.

As a developer, i do no longer assume increasing HW specs. It's over, and frozen at present time levels at best. Luckily current specs are more than enough.
But sadly the games industry has big trouble to adapt to the new situation. It's still coupled to HW industry and it's progress. We do no longer benefit from this partnership at all, imho.

It's hardly a "SHOCKING TRUTH hidden in PLAIN SIGHT".

It's a non-shocking truth that's been publicly released and updated monthly for 23 years.

The Steam Hardware Survey has been published as long as Steam has been available. They published it in part because they wanted to help others in the industry back then know the same data they'd gathered for games like half-life 2, about what percent of customers had hardware capable of. More specifically, looking for graphics cards with features like hardware vertex buffers and buffer objects, texture compression, automatic mipmap generation, multiple color channels (which are now up to 16, 32-bit, 4-component inputs) and multi-texturing, and the then-new hardware-supported programmable shaders.

The rate of hardware adoption is nothing new, and the trend has been that about half of active gamers have had decade-old hardware is nothing new, it's the same trend line we've looked at since the very beginning. I remember in the early 1990s discussion about people who still had 286 computers. I remember back in '91 or '92 some of the earliest "real" code I wrote code that detected between 8088, 8086, 286, 386, 486, presence of a math coprocessor, EMS or XMS if present, and how much. Again, lots of decade-old computers even back in 1992.

The comment about the GeForce 20x0 not having "much more power than the 1080 Ti provides" made me laugh a little bit. I recommend you read a little bit about meshlets, and the incredible transformation they enabled when it came to rendering technology in all the modern game engines. It was the missing key for moving the entire LOD pipeline to hardware, something that "infinite level of detail" folks had been asking about even before 3D graphics gained hardware acceleration in the 1990s.

frob wrote:

It's hardly a "SHOCKING TRUTH hidden in PLAIN SIGHT".

I know, it's a clickbait title, but things get 10x more views when you use bombastic language. 😀

I think the situation is quite different than in the past. When Leadwerks 4 was released, only 20% of computers supported shader model 4 and people thought the system requirements were too high. A couple of years later 90% of computers supported it. Having a bigger portion of players on decade-old hardware than are using the mid-high end cards is definitely not something we have seen in the past. This isn't just the low end, this is a broken hardware upgrade cycle.

I don't understand why you are talking about mesh shaders. In terms of power a 2080 is not much better than a 1080. It has other capabilities, but the value of those features is a separate conversation.

frob wrote:

It was the missing key for moving the entire LOD pipeline to hardware, something that "infinite level of detail" folks had been asking about even before 3D graphics gained hardware acceleration in the 1990s.

That's not true. Techniques like cluster based culling were introduced in PS4 era, Nanite builds on top of that and does not need mesh shaders to enable it either. So mesh shaders were no missing key to enable any of this, it would have happened with or without them.
Raytracing and DLSS are the better arguments for your point, imo.

Josh Klint wrote:

This isn't just the low end, this is a broken hardware upgrade cycle.

Yes. That how it looks to me. And there are a bunch of reasons, none of them nice to admit or accept:

Moores Law is dead/dying. So we can use the same HW longer than we could 20 years ago. My 10 yo hw is still fine to play any game i actually want to play. I see there are new games out i can no longer run, but it's not many, so i'll wait until memory crisis is over. And i've had other excuses to wait before.

The fact that the number new games i would like to play is so small, is another point.
In a better world i would see many more games i'm interested in, so i would upgrade earlier.
Maybe it's just me growing out, but i'm not the only one saying old games are better than new games. Which is a problem.

Another point is expensive HW causing a shift towards cheaper options and less platforms.
Instead of owning a PC, a PS and a Switch, people may now just have the Switch, or even only their phone.
Idk statistics, but that's surely a factor.

Cloud gaming is probably no big factor yet, but idk.

Then there are a few guys like me, who literally boycott new HW also to protest against new features i did not ask for and have no use for.
It's wasted silicon area to me, so i'm not willing to pay three times the price for a new GPU which still has the same number of CUs otherwise. That's a small, but important factor. I think path tracing is nice but too expensive, and i don't like those AI slop faces we saw. And still, they say that's the future. Problem: I don't want this future, and i will not pay them to get there.
So i refuse to upgrade also to vote with my wallet. Sadly we no longer agree on what's the way forward, hurting business as well.