OpenSUSE Developers Continue Discussing x86_64 Microarchitecture Feature Levels

[arQon]

And gamers (i.e. the people using Steam) are more likely than average to be running newer & higher-end hardware.

"Than average", sure, but there are a LOT of gamers who don't fit the "teenage boy with a PC (and mouse and keyboard) that looks like the Las Vegas strip" stereotype, and a lot of them run HW that *by* gaming standards is pretty much potato.

The largest group for Intel CPUs, for example, is 2.3 Ghz to 2.69 Ghz. That smells like laptop, which means it may well be running on integrated graphics and will have serious noise and thermals issues either way. (And the third largest only improves that to 2.7 Ghz to 2.99 Ghz, with the two of them combined adding up to over 30%).

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey used to break it down by CPU, which was a lot more interesting (and had the i3 dominant) it's more opaque now. It also doesn't show C/T, which is pretty annoying.

[coder]

"Than average", sure, but there are a LOT of gamers who don't fit the "teenage boy with a PC (and mouse and keyboard) that looks like the Las Vegas strip" stereotype, and a lot of them run HW that *by* gaming standards is pretty much potato.

But that "hardcore" set is going to skew the population towards newer & higher end hardware than your typical Linux install will use.

There's another factor affecting Steam usage, which is that even non-hardcore games will not tend to game much, if the experience is bad. Hence, those with older & lower-end machines will tend to drop out of the survey.

Again, this is about population statistics, and you can't deny that gaming involves factors which will skew the statistics towards newer & higher-end machines than what the general computing public is using. Furthermore, Linux has some factors probably skewing its users towards older machines, because Linux users tend to be more technical and therefore more willing & able to keep old machines running.