The Live Indian Entertainment Blog

Valve's Steam gaming "platform" has only recently come to the Mac. Thus, the monthly Valve Steam hardware survey has some interesting tidbits about the state of PC vs. Mac in the Steam world.

It seems that while the majority of Windows PCs have either 2 or 3GB of RAM, most Macs (53 percent, to be exact) have 4GB of RAM. There's a clue to why that is in the statistics on the most popular OS: it's still 32-bit Windows XP at 33.8 percent (though that has dropped 3.79 percent). In third is 32-bit Windows Vista at 14.55 percent. Thus, nearly 50 percent of those surveyed are using an OS that does not allow addressing 4GB of RAM.

Still, that will change as gamers upgrade and go with Windows 7 on new PCs. It's interesting, however, that PC gamers seem to be limping along with older systems. It does point to the fact that many Windows users choose to upgrade their graphics cards rather than a system swap-out.

On the other hand, 55.41 percent of Windows users have dual-core systems, while over 90 percent of Macs have a dual-core CPU. Macs also win at internet connectivity, as well, with 65 percent reporting download speeds of over 2 Mbps compared to under half of PCs.

However, PCs always rule in terms of GPUs. Besides the fact that there is no support for multi-GPU technologies such as the Crossfire and SLI technologies from ATI and NVIDIA, PC gamers can swap out their video cards any time they like it, keeping their systems "alive." That said, the Mac has been getting better of late, though there's another place PCs rule: number of games games released on the OS.