A year ago there was an article about how only a third of Steam users ran their games at 1080p. Very small percentages of the Steam userbase had the capabilities to run multi-monitor setups or 2K, 4K or 8K setups. A year later, the percentages made some significant moves in various categories.

The July, 2015 hardware survey was released by Valve and it indicates some interesting trends when compared to the hardware survey of last year. In that article there was a lot of butthurt over the fact that not everyone gaming on PC had the capabilities to run their games at 1920 x 1080p… something that Sony has been pushing hard for in their marketing of the $400 home console. In fact, 100% of PS4 owners will be able to play any advertised game that’s been confirmed to run natively at 1080p, where-as PC gamers only with the necessary hardware will be able to match that feat. In result, we find out just how many that actually is.

According to the hardware survey, only 34.72% of PC gamers run their primary display at 1080p, as indicated in the image below.

Last year around this time that number was at 32.89%. That’s a 1.83% year-over-year increase in the 1080p adoption rate.

The next highest in the 2014 survey was the laptop resolution of 1366 x 768 with 25.60% of the share.

This year, the 1366 x 768 resolution is still second place with 26.61% of the share. It means more people have registered for Steam who use a laptop.

That last figure isn’t too surprising given that a lot of popular games like Trove or Unturned can be played on fairly low-end machines and make it very accessible for kids or young people who don’t have or can’t afford a high-end machine.

What’s interesting is that a year ago 1600 x 900 – also referred to as 900p when applied to a progressive scan monitor or television – has actually dropped this year compared to last year. Last year it was 7.83% while this year it was only 7.41%. So there was a 0.42% drop in using the 900p primary resolution. The fact that more people have adopted 1080p shows that maybe people are slowly migrating away from the non full-HD resolutions and upgrading to a higher resolution.

Also worth noting is that 4K resolution at 3840 x 2160 has gone up by 0.07%. This is up over the 2014 survey results of only 0.02%. That’s a significant leap for that particular resolution given how expensive monitors are to hit 4K and how expensive it is to have SLI or Crossfire GPUs that can handle running games and media at that resolution. Again, there’s a slow migration toward the higher resolutions.

You can also see how 2K resolutions like 2560 x 1440 have steadily gone up compared to last year. This year’s numbers sit at 1.19% where-as last year was at 0.94%.

Most of the high-end HD resolutions show small yet notable changes whereas the lower resolutions – even the popular ones – show a steady decline.

It’s very interesting seeing the numbers, especially when you consider that 44.54% of Steam users are now all rocking quad-core CPUs while 48.03% still dominate with dual-core CPUs. Nearly half of all Steam users are up to quads, while nearly 0.30% have gone higher and settled with octo-core units. Strangely there’s a 2.88% group rocking tri-cores. So.. power to the tri-force!

According to Steam there’s a 0.18% adoption rate over the last year toward quad-core CPU setups. There’s also a lopsided amount of people using Intel CPUs over AMD… 75.3% to be exact.

You can check out the archived version of the Steam hardware survey right here or you can see the latest version of the hardware survey right here.

(Main image courtesy of Paynamia)