Steam, the online computer gaming portal, keeps track of what hardware its players are using to access the many games in its service.
Of interest in the exhaustive list of specs is the fact that 49.46 percent of Mac gamers on Steam game on a Macbook Pro. Which makes sense, of course, as that’s a pretty powerful laptop. From there, we see the iMac coming in at 28 percent, plain-jane MacBooks garnering 9.49 percent, and the MacBook Air, my personal machine, used by 6.29 percent of Mac Steam gamers. The MacBook Pro and MacBook Air both rose in the hardware charts, with an increase of .44 and .89 percent, respectively.
Another interesting note is that a 58 percent majority of Mac gamers on Steam have 4 Gb of RAM, while a large minority of 28 percent have 5 Gb or more of RAM memory. I’d have thought that it’d have been switched, of course, as RAM does affect the playability of a great many games, though not as much as the RAM in individual video cards does.
Speaking of video cards, there’s a long list of them being used in Macs to play Steam games, with (obviously) Intel HD Graphics and the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M topping the list at 17 and almost 12 percent, respectively. Below those two, however, ATI and NVIDIA cards top the charts all the way down, with nary an Intel card on the list until the bottom.
What OS are Mac gamers using to blast aliens and solve puzzles? Mainly Lion (10.7.4 at 49 percent) and Snow Leopard (10.6.8 at 31 percent), of course. Apparently, not a lot of folks are playing games if they’re not updated to the latest OS version. Both those numbers are 64 bit versions, as well. Surprised? Not us.
The largest number of Mac Steam gamers are using the standard 2 CPUs, as measured by Valve, with only a few outliers using more. Most of the Mac players have a microphone and most speak English, both of which reflect the larger Steam numbers as a whole.
Check out the full report on the Steam website, and geek out with us on the Cult of Mac forums or comments below about your own setup and whether you play Steam games on your Mac or not.
