First results from the 4.11.0 survey

From ZDoom: link to original post

We now have 2000 survey reports so it is time for a first summary.

Here's the most interesting numbers:

25.4% use a Geforce RTX card
20.9% use a Geforce GTX960 or better
5.6% use an AMD Radeon RX high end card

8.1% use an Intel UHD with Vulkan compatibility, a further 6-7% use other low end hardware
7.6% use hardware that requires OpenGL and has no Vulkan support, of this 0.4% are performant enough to run the full GL backend

2.5% use Macs, 2.2% on ARM, 0.3% on x64. (The Mac version was the last one released so this will probably increase.)
12% use Linux
1.5% use the Steam Deck


The trend that has shown in the last two surveys has continued. OpenGL usage in general has shrunk but not much - but what did happen is that the high end of OpenGL has nearly been entirely vacated (the numbers are so small that a single report results in wild fluctuations), what is left here is ultra low performance integrated chipsets. At the same time, uptake for high end graphics hardware has stopped. We can see that within the segment the specs increase (RTX went from 20% to 25%, this was the only segment with actual growth but it all came at the cost of the high end GTX segment) but we see virtually no migration from the mid range to here. On the other hand we see the oldest still supported GPUs slowly decline but they seem to be replaced with equally weak ones only two or three years more recent.

The only conclusion that can be drawn by now is that we got two mutually exclusive groups at both ends - those with good computers will continuously upgrade them and those with low spec systems will tend to ride them out until they break and then get another low end system again, so I do not see the market shift in any meaningful way for the foreseeable future. What Intel puts into their low end CPUs is still pathetic.

The only thing I can say with certainty is that the current market situation makes it impossible to let OpenGL continue to dictate the engine's roadmap. With all the work being done on vkDoom a split is inevitable, so that the modern Vulkan backend can continue unencumbered and the remaining OpenGL hardware can be serviced by a legacy fork only receiving the game-side changes but have the render backend feature frozen, also using GLES as default.

Statistics: Posted by Graf Zahl — Sat Sep 30, 2023 12:16 pm — Replies 0 — Views 12

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