It seems that after a very long delay, ATI is now beginning to reap the rewards of its very expensive deal with Valve. Statistics coming back from Steam users, following the release of Half-Life 2, indicate some good news for the Canadian graphics giant.
For over a year now the company stood to one side as Valve's troubles adversly effected the company's planning but ATI knew that if it remained patient it would eventually benefit from its choice to partner with Valve.
According to figures released by Valve regarding the hardware profiles of Steam users, for the first time in recorder history the mighty GeForce 4 MX has been toppled from the top. The new King of Steam is ATIs 9800 series board which, surprisingly, even beats the 9600 series, a cheaper DirectX 9 card.
This change in leadership was observed immediately following H-L 2s release in The U.S. and in the rest of the world. The leading quartet of boards is made up of two card from each manufacturer as the GeForce4 MX is still hanging to 2nd place, with the Radeon 9600 in 3rd and the GF 4 trailing in 4th place.
The Steam figures are a testament to the excessive pricing by both manufacturers in their war for the speed crown, since their flagship boards, the 6800 Ultra and the XT800 XT PE both have a ludicrous 0.31 per cent share of Steam gamers. Other graphics setups worthy of a mention are Intel's 810 with 0.47 per cent and nVidia's TNT2 which still hangs on to a 1.38 per cent share.
So Steam is also useful for collecting user hardware information, we are certain however that Valve asks for permission before collecting user information.
