Annonymous usage statistics

[Xetick]

Seeing as knowing is half the battle and using valves hardware survey doesn't really reflect what normal non-gamers have for machines I started to collect some anonymous usage statistics in my visualizer. Now it has been collecting this info for a few months and contains a bit over 12000 installations I though I share the knowledge here first. You can find the stats over at the statistics page.

Worth noting is that 20% of the installations have something under OpenGL 2.1 support and 25% uses intel or no OpenGL driver at all. No wonder Chrome and Firefox are forced to convert all WebGL shaders to DirectX and use that driver instead.

At least no one seems to use 800x600 displays anymore.

[benny!]

GREAT  Really interesting. Thanks a lot and K++ for sharing those stats.

I am quite surprised about the big fragmentation concerning resolution and OpenGl driver versions!

[hellfire]

If more than 70% of the users have 2 screens I should probably add better support for it...

[benny!]

Yep, if your target group is into coding/computer dev I guess it is nowadays quite likely that they have 2 monitors, still very interesting to see those numbers in a stat with our own eyes.

Wondering if there are any demoscene production which supports multiple monitors 

[Xetick]

If more than 70% of the users have 2 screens I should probably add better supported for it...

Thanks for reminding me. I found that value strange but forgot to check it out more. I dont think it accurate so you can ignore it and I'll remove it from the page.

It seems that most drivers report multiple monitors when evaluated using the 'EnumDisplayDevices' even though they are not connected/used. I need to find out why and how to correctly detect monitors that are actually used since just about all cards have multiple ports these days.

[benny!]

Hmm .. that would be interesting to know. I really could imagine that the mayority of technical-interested computer owners might really have two monitors already.

Hmm...

[TinDragon]

Well it's interesting to see some stats, one thing to consider on the opengl version, this is actually tied to the driver they have installed in alot of cases. I was running an ati driver that reported only opengl 3.1 support up until about a week ago when I updated driver again and now it reports 3.3. But of course non-gamer PC users are not known for keeping drivers upto date so that kinda makes sense in the context your looking at

[Clyde]

It is interesting stats indeed.

But as Money is extremely tight fisted, I still use 640 x 480 and 800 x 600 for stuff demos and game, and allthough I have an intel dual core and 2gb ram, I have a Geforce 7600gs. W7 64-bit likes it. I'm probably in the 0.99%

[Xetick]

I was running an ati driver that reported only opengl 3.1 support up until about a week ago when I updated driver again and now it reports 3.3. But of course non-gamer PC users are not known for keeping drivers upto date so that kinda makes sense in the context your looking at

Yepp, now days if you get a new computer you could very well have a gfx card that can handle OpenGl 4.1+ but the driver installed by default only handles say 2.0. The user needs to manually find and update the gfx card driver or get some using windows update. Firefox and Chrome realized this and did what they had to do with WebGL. Its a bummer for us OpenGL developers and the WebGL crowd also for that matter that have to live with broken shaders and very long compile/conversion times.

On another note I found the error with the monitor count so it should be correct in the next version. The stats will take a while to correct itself though but the stats page will stay where it is and I'll add in the monitor count again when I feel more confident that the value is correct. It will probably be a few months from now though.

Realized that the total desktop resolution might be a good thing to grab also so I'll add that into the statistics gathering while I'm at it.

I also get statistics about what scenes are mostly viewed. In the top 10 is one that shows a yellow bar that says "Crime scene do not cross". I can safely say that I'm a bit surprised by that. Another very liked one is starfields. I guess nothing beats the classics. At least the android scene has the top spot

[hellfire]

I really could imagine that the mayority of technical-interested computer owners might really have two monitors already.

But do they use their screens to display winamp visuals?

Wondering if there are any demoscene production which supports multiple monitors

Probably not because of the borders in the middle of the screen.
It'd require a completely different design with a different area of interest (well, actually two) - much like you'd do on nintendo ds...
I guess some split-screen design like they did in 24 (that tv series) would work well; switching between the screens or even running scenes simultaneously...

Oh, I'm offtopic 

[benny!]

I really could imagine that the mayority of technical-interested computer owners might really have two monitors already.

But do they use their screens to display winamp visuals?

ROFL ... guess you are right. Or even Div-X player  But well, at least when using some scripting language it is nice to see the output immediately on the other screen...

Wondering if there are any demoscene production which supports multiple monitors

Probably not because of the borders in the middle of the screen.
It'd require a completely different design with a different area of interest (well, actually two) - much like you'd do on nintendo ds...
I guess some split-screen design like they did in 24 (that tv series) would work well; switching between the screens or even running scenes simultaneously...

Oh, I'm offtopic 

Hmm ... could be interesting anyway ...

[Xetick]

I guess some split-screen design like they did in 24 (that tv series) would work well; switching between the screens or even running scenes simultaneously...

All scenes I create for Plane9 do keep multiple monitors in mind and sometimes its kinda tricky to do as you say. A simple example would be a rotating object. Using two monitors it sits in the border between the two and will look quite crappy.  On the other hand a demo that was designed for it from start to finish would probably look awesome since seeing any effect covering both monitors makes it look a lot better. Say take two of those objects and let each on of them be affected by the beat of the music from the left and right speaker respectively. It would directly look much better than on a single monitor.

But then they show this on the main projector at a party and the effect is lost.. 

[hellfire]

Have you gathered any statistics on how many are running a 64 bit OS, too?
Personally I'm still using WinXP (32 bit) but I'm wondering if it's time to go 64 bit already...

[TinDragon]

I have a few friends who I play games online and chat to alot and there all on 64bit OS's, they never have any issues running anything i can run on 32bit vista, but if there's a 64bit version they of course they run that. If I were to upgrade to win7 then i would go 64bit, I dont see any reason not to when I can still run 32bit apps on it.

I would love the extra memory that can be given to the OS and to each program running under 64bit, stuff like 3d modelling eats ram for breakfast at high poly's

[Moroboshisan]

Have you gathered any statistics on how many are running a 64 bit OS, too?
Personally I'm still using WinXP (32 bit) but I'm wondering if it's time to go 64 bit already...

Actually I'm planning to go Win7 64bit... I'm using it from quite some time now (about 8 months) without too much hassle... just a couple of drivers for my notebook (Acer Aspire 5710 from 2007!) made me crazy on the first attempt but everything runs fine now... 32apps runs well... only had some scratching-head with Fasm to compile old sourcecode "KeytronAdvertro.fasm" (but that's just my fault... I'm unable to fix the code to compile onto a 64bit architecture/OS).

[Shockwave]

Im on Windows 7 64 bit - the only things I'v ereally had any bother with were Sim City 2000 which will not work, I had to repack most of my 4kb collection as they stopped working and I had to fudge command and conquer to make it work but apart from that everything is cool and I seem to be able to run most demos

[hellfire]

only had some scratching-head with Fasm to compile old sourcecode
I'm unable to fix the code to compile onto a 64bit architecture/OS

Yes, Assembler is pretty much the problem I see coming.
When I start doing anything clever using more and bigger registers, I'm quite certainly too lazy to support a 32 bit build
That's why I'm curious if I'm one of last few riding 32 bit on a reasonable demo platform...

[mind]

dunno if anyone mentioned it, and im way too drunk to read all of the replies, but i consider shader model version to be a rather important statistic aswell..