Valve have published the results of their December 2016 Hardware and Software Survey, and there’s been some really interesting shifts in the last six months since July.
While I should certainly start by stating that the survey is almost not 100% accurate, it is most definitely a good general look at the representative shift of hardware and accessories; so we’ll roll with it.
VR is most definitely a hot topic at the moment, with three major devices launching last year; albeit one exclusively for Playstation.
VR ownership crept up to 0.38% of people who completed the survey, with both the Vive and Oculus Rift (Consumer) gaining 0.02% of the total over the last six months. This is hard to draw parallels with when it comes to the VR Headsets subheading, which relays the previous 8 months instead – dating from April. In this department the VIVE has stepped up from 16.2% up to 61.01%, while Oculus (Consumer) has stepped up from 4.7% to 31.43%
Interestingly the Oculus Rift Developer Kit 2 still holds 7.56% of the audience, which is a little over 24% of the total Oculus install base.
It should be added however, that because VIVE hardware isn’t separated into Developer Kits and Consumer Kits (because they are the same) there’s no way of telling what percentage of the audience is currently using it mainly for development.
In another areas, nVidea have moved from 52.5% up to 58.84% of the video cards surveyed, with Intel losing 2.2%, and ATI 4%.
Windows 10 as dominant OS was further cemented, with both the 64 & 32 bit versions being the only versions of Windows to improve, bringing it up to a total of 50.35% of the surveyed audience. The hold-outs using Vista 64bit slipped from 0.07% of the audience down to 0.06% although this could well be from new audience rather than people betraying the Vista fortress
As a final observation, the small encampment of maniacs with less than 10GB of free hard drive space increased by 0.07%, meaning that 1.44% of people surveyed were likely insane or very, very forgetful.
Source: Valve
