GZDoom 4.9.0 survey – the final rundown

From ZDoom: link to original post

Now that the survey is closed and I had time to crunch the available numbers, here's some more detailed results than usual.

The following breakdown was made with 15400 reports overall:

First the hardware breakdown:

43.3% are using an NVidia high end card, meaning a Geforce GTX 970 or better.
7.2% use a comparable AMD card
2.8% use an oder generation high end NVidia card, meaning Geforce GTX 670 or better
1.8% use an Apple M1/M2
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55.1% use modern hardware with good or excellent performance.

8.7% use mid range hardware that may not have sufficient performance for using postprocessing effects
27.5% use low end hardware that nomially supports Vulkan - these are mostly older laptops.
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8.7% uses non-Vulkan capable hardware - this was roughly at 10% most of the time during my initial reports but i made a mistake there and erroneously excluded some entry level Geforces from Vulkan that actually do support it. With this being corrected, non-Vulkan capable hardware dropped significantly below 10%.

Now the operation system breakdown:

82.1% use Windows 10 or Windows 11
3.8% use Windows 7 or Windows 8.
4 users (not percent!) used Windows on ARM, one of thse in a VM on a Mac.

1.6% use a Mac with Intel CPU
1.8% use a Mac with ARM CPU

10.5% use Linux


So, what does this all mean?
First, we have seen a very steep drop in use of non-Vulkan capable hardware. This was around 15% last year, so this segment shed roughly 40% of its user base - but the interesting thing here that it is mostly the higher end, i.e. Geforce GTX 550 and up, that are responsible for the drop. This segment of the user base has virtually evaporated by now, leaving mostly Intel powered systems. NVidia now stands at less than 10% of non-Vulkan capable hardware, and only half of this features some decent performance.

With this and the performance characteristics of the remaining hardware considered the future of OpenGL support needs some serious reconsideration.95% of this hardware is better served by the GLES backend with its low end specific optimizations.
This situation will be addressed by reworking the startup code to prefer GLES and Vulkan and demote the full GL backend to a fallback option, so that it can still be used in case one of the others does not work. In general, though, it should be clear that OpenGL's days are numbered.

More importantly, though, the situation on macOS now is that the Intel segment is shrinking while the ARM segment is disproportionately growing. On M1, however, OpenGL is close to useless - and performance tests on Intel based Macs generally show that Vulkan/MoltenVK tends to have roughly the same performance as OpenGL. Furthermore, the number of Mac users on non-Metal capable hardware is so low (low double digits, less than 0.1% of the total user base) that this does not warrant keeping support alive. As such, the next GZDoom release will drop OpenGL support on macOS and from now on only provide the Vulkan/MoltenVK backend using the native Metal API.

Windows 7 is also dropping rapidly. This has no immediate consequences, but expect regressions to occur in cases where we have to consider better support on modern OSs that do not filter back well.

Statistics: Posted by Graf Zahl — Sun Dec 18, 2022 4:50 am — Replies 0 — Views 10

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