It's time to check in and see, courtesy of Valve's hardware surveys, what the average PC gamer's rig looks like. Hmm. Uh huh, uh huh. Yeah, I'm still average. Great?
There have been some changes in critical categories since the last time we took a good look at the results (I know, they're published every month, but we're not obsessive compulsive enough to check in every four weeks). For starters, while Nvidia's GeForce 8800 was the graphics card of choice in January, by May it's the Radeon HD 4800. Nvidia still dominates the market overall, however, with 69% of users owning one of their cards.
Something that's a little surprising is how fast the uptake of quad-core processors is, as 25% of Steam users are now packing one. I've got a dual core and find most games still can't make use of two.
In other important bits, 41% of you have graphics cards ready for DirectX 11, Intel is the most popular chip provider by far, and only 61% of Steam's userbase has their PC set to the English language. Considering how unfair the service's pricing structure is for European customers, that's more than a little shocking.
Steam Hardware Survey: May 2010 [Valve]