First results from the GZDoom 3.3.0 survey

[Graf Zahl]

I already posted a few numbers on the news thread, but I am certain that some people may be very interested about the results.
We now hit the number of 900 distinct users reporting, so here's a quick rundown of the interesting stuff:

6 users reported using Windows XP - that's actually a lot lower than we would have expected!

85 users have reported data for the software renderer.
870 users have reported data for the hardware renderer.

13 users run the software renderer on a 32 bit system.
14 users run the software renderer with the 32 bit EXE on a 64 bit system (An important note to these: The 64 bit software renderer is considerably faster on your system!)

39 users run the hardware renderer on a 32 bit system.
98 users run the hardware renderer with the 32 bit EXE on a 64 bit system (If you do so, we'd appreciate some feedback. If there is a performance issue, please update the graphics driver.)

49 users run the hardware renderer in legacy (OpenGL 2.0) mode
287 users run the hardware renderer on OpenGL 3.x and 4.x capable hardware
534 users run the hardware renderer on Vulkan capable hardware. (The number may be higher, because there is no easy way to detect Vulkan support on Intel graphics, it can only be done quickly on NVidia and AMD.)

3 users run the software renderer without the hardware accelerated 2D elements
0 users run the software renderer on ancient cards which only support Shader Model 1.4

Needless to say, the biggest surprise here is that the vast majority of 32 bit downloads is actually being used on 64 bit systems. Anyone doing this should really reconsider, and if there's legitimate performance issues, try to solve them. The 64 bit version should run significantly better on such a system, if that system is properly working.

[Tormentor667]

This is interesting to read, wouldn‘t have expected some of the results

[Graf Zahl]

Me neither. I would have expected XP and GL2.x to be a lot higher, for example.

[Rachael]

My guess is the XP users are too concerned with their precious privacy that they're not even aware of how much they're shooting their own foot. Oh well, no loss there!

[Graf Zahl]

My guess is the XP users are too concerned with their precious privacy that they're not even aware of how much they're shooting their own foot. Oh well, no loss there!

I had the same thought. But on the other hand I do not believe that some kind of hive mentality can distort the results that much. Aside from the normal fluctuations the percentage of these has been pretty much consistent since the first numbers came in. It'd take a lot of coincidence to have the vast majority of XP users being that paranoid that they refuse to send their data. At some point the amount of data becomes large enough to discount such effects.

With a bit of number crunching I'd say that the theoretical maximum of this kind of user could be 60 or 70. But then we'd see some strong deviation in reported 32 bit systems compared to the amount of downloads. But that isn't the case. It is roughly identical for 32 bit and 64 bit and the 64 bit version does not run on XP. Which leads to the conclusion that for all intents and purposes the actual number of XP users really hovers around 1% and the paranoid faction is just some background noise that tends to become annoying when getting concentrated.

[Rip and Tear]

How many non-Windows users?

[Graf Zahl]

112 at the time those numbers were compiled. 93 on Linux, 29 on Mac. But these are inflated by those who self-compiled from the repo before the release.

[Blue Shadow]

3 users run the software renderer without the hardware accelerated 2D elements

How does one know if they're running the software renderer with or without the hardware accelerated 2D elements?

[Rachael]

Chances are you are.

Non-accelerated 2D will have a console that's not transparent when it is pulled down. Also it will not have truecolour weapons or menu elements unless swtruecolor is turned on.

If you're able to type "toggle vid_hw2d" in the console and see a difference, then you're running hardware accelerated. If it looks the same, you're not.

[Blue Shadow]

Thanks.

I had a feeling it had something to do with vid_hw2d console variable, but weirdly, when I searched for it in my ini file, I couldn't find it. I thought it was removed or something. I just checked it in GZDoom, and it reports that it's set to 'true'.

[Graf Zahl]

Yes, that one selects which one is active. And I also wonder if those (now) 4 users are running that because they want the 'pure' feeling of everything paletted or because they own old hardware, that's something the survey cannot detect.

[Apeirogon]

I copy gzdoom.ini from previous version of gzdoom to new.

I need spent half of the hours passing through jungle of display options, to setting all options to my preferred, in new gzdoom version to send my user report in the statistics table?

[Rachael]

And I also wonder if those (now) 4 users are running that because they want the 'pure' feeling of everything paletted or because they own old hardware, that's something the survey cannot detect.

If the palette shader is extended to the software renderer, and written to use the whole screen instead of the game's viewport, those users can still enjoy the "pure palette" feeling, no?

[Graf Zahl]

Not really. But it'd be peanuts to add a 'force all textures to the palette' option which would make 90% of the rendered output be downconverted to the palette. All you need to do is force TEX_Pal on all textures being created. The only thing that'd be excluded would be fonts and translations that map to RGB space but those are rare in 2D.

I'm not too worried about it.

[Graf Zahl]

After now having 1500 reporting users, not much about the numbers has changed. The percentage of most points has remained nearly identical with somewhat higher numbers each.

One more interesting thing is that we got 3x as many Linux users as we have downloads of the binary, suggesting a large number of people who self-compile.