Discussion: Windows Market Statistics

Hellbovine

Hellbovine

Well-Known Member
The following data may help people in their decision making when it comes to questions, such as which Windows to use or what hardware to build a computer with. None of these stats are perfect since Microsoft doesn't release this information, so we're relying on third party sources, but it is still reliable enough to use. The items below were last updated on July 18th, 2023.

DATA SOURCES
Stats were taken from these popular and reputable sources:
- StatCounter (link1)
- Steam (link2)

KEY TAKEAWAYS
The percentage of users is rounded and listed in parenthesis:
- Windows 10 is the most common (71%)
- Almost all users are now on 64-bit (99%)
- 16 GB RAM is the most common (51%)
- 6 core CPU is the most common (32%)
- Intel CPU is the most common (68%)
- Intel CPU speeds from 2.3 Ghz to 2.69 Ghz are most common (23%)
- Nvidia graphics are the most common (82%)
- Nvidia GTX 1650 is the most common (6%)
- 1920x1080 resolution is the most common (62%)
- 100 GB to 249 GB disk drives are most common (24%)
- Oculus Quest 2 is the most common VR device (42%)

MISCELLANEOUS
Relevant news from recent months:
- Windows 10 version 21H1 reached end of life on December 13th, 2022
- Windows 8.1 (all versions) reached end of life on January 10th, 2023
- Windows 7 (all versions) reached end of life on January 10th, 2023
- Chrome only supports Windows 10 and 11 after January 10th, 2023
- Steam will only support Windows 10 and 11 after January 1st, 2024
- Firefox will only support Windows 10 and 11 after September of 2024
 
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Hellbovine said:
- Intel CPU speeds between 2.3 Ghz and 2.69 Ghz are most common (20%)
- AMD CPU speeds between 3.3 Ghz and 3.69 Ghz are most common (12%)
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This statistic is correct, but not insightful. My understanding is current technology can't reliably make CPU's run faster than 3-4 GHz. so the solution is scaling up on multi-core CPU's.

What's more confusing is before Apple popularized the trend, all cores were equal in performance. But now AMD & Intel have hopped on the combination of E-cores (efficiency or low power) and P-cores (high performance) in a single package. So any comparison based on simple core count & clock speed will be useless.
 
choosing an OS isnt like food shopping, you use whatever os runs on your hardware and despite people saying "windows 7 only" they are going to be FoL 99% of the time.
 
garlin said:
This statistic is correct, but not insightful...So any comparison based on simple core count & clock speed will be useless.
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I agree, though I'd still encourage everyone to get at least a 3.0 Ghz since they are cheap enough. I'd rather have say a 4 core 3.0 Ghz processor than a 6 core 2.4 Ghz for gaming (if all other stats were equal, and the only main difference was speed and cores). For other stuff like video/audio editing or general Windows usage I'd get the cores though since many of those programs are now multi-threaded.
 
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editing/rendering audio at 16bit 44.1khz(even 48) does not stress a low end pc out, i edit/render(reaper and audacity) using a single core.
 
Hellbovine, thanks for the summary.

- CPU choice
Indeed, when choosing a CPU, focus primarily on a single-core speed, then the rest. And by that not the numbers by the manufacturer, but the independent benchmark results, e.g. single-core Cinebench or productivity focused tools.
Same is for NTLite processing speed, single-core is most important as image mounting and registry changes (so far) cannot be parallelized.

- OS Version
Need to comment on a potentially controversial topic, the OS version choice overthinking.

Isn't it in your best interest when buying a machine, to get it with the currently latest OS - with the goal of a longer support, software and hardware compatibility going forward.
Rarely, some special software can break on a newer OS (mostly temporarily due to drivers), but then install a virtual machine for that occasion with your previous OS. If it requires a GPU or something more than a virtual machine can provide, install the older OS on another partition of a real machine.

For those thinking they are safer on an older OS from spying, then don't add updates either, as Microsoft for sure is synchronizing those "features" on even the oldest of OS-es.
Then again you must take into account, am I safer with an older (docs leaked, security holes known etc) or newer (continuously patched, follows newer laws) backdoor/telemetry/whatever.

And as a kicker I would dare to say there is not much performance difference between Windows 7 and 11.
OS was never built to take most of the CPU in the background to begin with (temporary search indexing, component cleanup and spyware scan aside).
If a machine is really old, fine, but I am talking here about the choice between Win7->11. If Win7 is running fast, so will 11.
If you don't have a TPM device, add a card, if it doesn't have enough RAM, add more (second-hand now should be cheap for an older machine).
Or/and at least turn off (virtualization) security features and it should run just fine.
Goes without saying NTLite component removal makes a big difference in those cases.

Things like Win10 21H2 is the one, but Win10 22H2 is a no-no, is completely ridiculous to me.
If anyone has the exact data as to why is an older sub-version better than the other, I'm all ears.
 
garlin said:
This statistic is correct, but not insightful. My understanding is current technology can't reliably make CPU's run faster than 3-4 GHz. so the solution is scaling up on multi-core CPU's.

What's more confusing is before Apple popularized the trend, all cores were equal in performance. But now AMD & Intel have hopped on the combination of E-cores (efficiency or low power) and P-cores (high performance) in a single package. So any comparison based on simple core count & clock speed will be useless.
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Big chunky cache really has moved the needle lately more so then clock speed.. Amd with bulldozer and piledriver was a step in the right direction but failed miserably however paved the way to better things.. Ryzen was even better with better sales.

Eventually on CPU's you can only put so much on the chip and have to sacrifice other areas. Duel CPU's may become the future were one is performance and the other used for simple tasks.

When will it come a point where we have dual slot GPU with two slots together in one GPU?

Something is going to have to change in the future.
 
nuhi said:
...And as a kicker I would dare to say there is not much performance difference between Windows 7 and 11...
...Things like Win10 21H2 is the one, but Win10 22H2 is a no-no, is completely ridiculous to me...
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I agree with almost everything Nuhi mentioned in his reply, and I think I can provide insight into the above comments. I recognize that the Nuhi's and Garlin's of the world don't always agree with us gamers, and that's totally understandable. It just comes down to our different personal experiences and how we use our computers which has shaped some of our divergent views, while overall I think most of us are in general agreement about computers.

I'm not expecting most people will read through all of this, but if you really want to try and understand where gamer mindsets are, I think this is a highly detailed summary of the major hurdles us gamers, and even the average Windows user, has had to endure over the years. Microsoft, if you're listening, please take notes.

I want to preface this by pointing out that I'm extremely experienced in the gaming world, I've participated and ranked in the top 1% of various games, I've created and ran multiple clans, websites, and forums. I've built several computers, wrote countless guides, and worked in quality control as a game developer and playtester. My whole family is a group of gamers, and I was lucky enough to grow up playing in a 4 person LAN household, with my father, mother, two brothers, sister, and now with my wife and kids. I started on DOS and watched it evolve into Windows 11, and in this time I've had to tweak and troubleshoot way too much stuff.

OPERATING SYSTEM COMPARISONS
Nuhi mentioned W7 vs W11 and that there isn't much performance difference. This one is tricky because from a pure data standpoint it's not accurate, as we have tools like the task manager that show us there are differences in resource consumption, and every older operating system always uses less than the newest one does. Some things to compare here are memory usage, threads, handles, processes, network activity, disk activity, frame rates, and DPC latency.

If we take a look at the Nvidia DPC thread on this forum for example, some of those computers you could not use for competitive gaming. Huge DPC spikes are objectively not good for an online first person shooter, as it will not only overtly affect frame rates (stutters) and interfere with mouse and keyboard presses (input lag), but will cause network issues too (ping). While this problem isn't always specific to the OS, a heavier OS is far more likely to have these issues because there are more things running in the background that can interfere, increasing the likelihood of problems. Car mechanics will tell you they prefer working on older cars because it's easier since all the bells and whistles of modern cars make for longer and more expensive repairs, yet the gas mileage in cars is unchanged--Windows is exactly the same.

Older operating systems are lighter and thus generally better for intensive and sensitive applications, such as games, especially online gaming. I can't really stress the online aspect enough, as the slightest interference for less than 1 second can quite literally result in you shooting and killing an enemy before they do the same to you, being the difference between winning and losing.

Nuhi is correct in that it's not really that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things, if it was all working as intended, but often times things don't work properly though, and this leads to problems which cause gamers to tweak things. This ends up creating additional issues because most gamers don't really know what they are doing when it comes to tweaking, since the vast majority of them don't benchmark or monitor anything, they just go by "feel" which is almost always placebo effect. This is resulting in a lot of misinformation on the internet, which is why this topic is complicated, plus there's a difference between casual gamers and hardcore gamers too. Casual gamers don't need top tier machines, but asking a skilled gamer to play on a low-end machine would be frustrating to say the least.

If you sat me down at a computer running 60 frames per second I will not be able to do what I'm fully capable of. Put me on a machine pulling a consistent 120 frames per second, and I'm going to get banned for suspected cheating. Is it because I'm some sort of gaming god, absolutely not. I just went out of my way to practice and learn, and worked hard at it for years, just like athletes do at their sports. In effect I and many other people have become very sensitive to latency, and can pull off feats at higher frame rates that we cannot do at lower ones because the input lag is different and it changes the game mechanics. You have to live it to fully appreciate it, and if you don't play games then most of this is moot.

OPERATING SYSTEM VERSIONS
Nuhi brought up how gamers tend to compare the different versions of Windows for the OS. For example, someone may be using W10 1809, but refuses to use W10 22H2. This is a great point, but there is some validity behind these people's decisions. The main reasoning for these version choices can be summarized as bugs, and ease of use. Every version and edition of Windows has bugs, and drivers are also subject to this. Some of the bugs are worse than others, and can greatly affect gaming in a very negative way, even for casual gamers. As you can see in that Nvidia DPC thread, it is clear that things like drivers and the OS can create a number of problems for people, and tweaking the OS can improve things, hence why NTLite has so many gaming customers.

Version 22H2 got pulled after it was released because of yet another performance bug Microsoft created. The problem though is that not all of these kinds of issues actually get patched, or ever fully resolved. In fact, Microsoft tried to ignore this one at first and only addressed it because Nvidia forced them to after enough gamers complained. The overall problems tend to gradually increase from version to version and from each OS to the next, rather than get better. The reason for this is extremely simple, the more complex Microsoft makes the OS, and the more bloat they add, the more interference and lack of optimization there is, the more bugs will exist.

I did quality control on countless projects for a game, and frankly the coding a lot of people do is awful, and full of bugs and typos. I could take a 4,000 line project someone handed me and refactor it to use not only 50% less lines of code, but the end result would also be less resource consumption when it was done, and provide a more polished and intuitive experience for the gamer. It was so bad at times that I could create my own version of their projects from scratch, faster than it took to fix or refactor theirs. I know that this example has to at least resonate with the IT/coding guys out there. Microsoft is no different here, they fired their quality control teams and those ramifications are highly visible now.

Microsoft has notoriously been in the spotlight in recent years for repeatedly botching updates. There are a plethora of news articles on this, they have crippled companies, which gets talked about a lot on IT forums. Also, keep in mind that with each new version many of our tweaks no longer work, and we have to waste time learning the new ones. People are so tired of things changing just for the sake of change.

Windows has gone downhill over the years in a few other ways too. Microsoft has continued to lock down the OS so that people cannot customize or tweak things as much, but in addition to that they are also adding more bloat people don't really want or need, as well as a whole lot of telemetry and even advertisements now. The negatives typically overshadow the positive changes they make, and so the general user experience on W10/W11 is worse than XP for example, and the internet is rampant with this sentiment. The older operating systems have been easier to use, customize, and maintain than the next, and that plays a huge role in people sticking with certain ones.

Nuhi is right about some points he raises though. For example, it is silly that people will install an old version like W10 1809 and then proceed to integrate all the Windows Updates or allow it to be automated...They really aren't on 1809 anymore at that point and I roll my eyes every time I see this kind of stuff, and unfortunately there is just no getting through to these people. Also, these post-install updates are overwriting their tweaks too, which many people are oblivious to.

Another scenario is that many people will go and optimize their systems, and then you look at their desktop and taskbar and there's dozens of programs they've installed, running at startup. They've got twitch streams minimized in a browser while they're playing a game online and running torrents in the background, plus a bunch of tweaking programs they don't understand or utilize properly. So many of these programs are bloat that achieve the same stuff you can do in other, better ways. This is why I advocate so much on the forums, to bring attention to these mistakes so that their gaming experiences are improved.

GAMING ACCESSIBILITY
The inevitable comment someone will think about my reply here is going to be something like, "So basically it's not that important unless you are a hardcore competitive gamer." And that's really a gross misinterpretation of this situation. Gaming is one of the fastest growing markets on the planet, and while everyone's skills vary, nobody should be denied a fun experience. Here's a few facts:

- Steam is the most popular gaming platform for computers
- Steam boasts a game catalog of over 50,000 games
- Over 120 million users login monthly to Steam
- At it's peak Steam reported over 30 million concurrent users online
- Over 31 billion hours of gaming have been logged on Steam

This is just one platform, think about what the data looks like when all platforms are added together...Console and mobile gaming are taking over as the dominant force nowadays, and this is mostly due to the ease of accessibility. It's cheaper, there's no need to learn about hardware to build a computer, no Windows install headaches, no compatibility issues, no confusion of drivers and updates, no tweaking necessary.

Computer gaming is declining over time because it's become too difficult and complicated. Steam is ultra bloated now too, I'll eventually have to write a guide on how to optimize that app. In conclusion, my entire reply here would be non-existent if it weren't for the needless complications in computers over the years, nor would the computer gaming market be declining as fast.
 
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Hellbovine said:
I actually agree with almost everything Nuhi mentioned in his reply, and I think I can provide insights into the above comments. I recognize that the Nuhi's and Garlin's of the world don't always agree with us gaming nerds, and that's totally understandable. It just comes down to our different personal experiences and how we use our computers which has shaped some of our divergent views, while overall I think most of us are in general agreement about computer stuff. The two groups of power-users (IT/coders vs gamers) typically don't see eye to eye on some things, and I'll try to explain why.
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Power User - I broke my PC doing something new. I must learn to fix it, and teach others.
Gamer - F***. Why won't someone tell me why it's broken?? I didn't touch anything!!
 
garlin said:
Power User - I broke my PC doing something new. I must learn to fix it, and teach others.
Gamer - F***. Why won't someone tell me why it's broken?? I didn't touch anything!!
Click to expand...
Haha, this is unfortunately 100% accurate. Here's the snippet from the text I wrote that acknowledges this:

"...if it was all working as intended, but often times things don't work properly though, and this leads to problems which cause gamers to tweak things. This ends up creating additional issues because most gamers don't really know what they are doing when it comes to tweaking, since the vast majority of them don't benchmark or monitor anything, they just go by "feel" which is almost always placebo effect. This is resulting in a lot of misinformation on the internet, which is why this topic is complicated..."
 
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W10/11 have struck a negative note with most non-Enterprise users. For this, there's a simple business reason.

Home consumers make NO MONEY for MS. Whatever it is, as the saying goes is a "rounding error". Enterprises with their $$$ support contracts, and the cloud is where all the revenue that makes MS stock so high. It's a recurring (steady) cash flow. You gamers pay virtually nothing (maybe your Dell/HP/Lenovo PC charged you an extra $40 for Windows, or gosh -- you "pirated LTSC". That puts you in the back of the priority list for Windows feature requirements.

What is with all the crap that's loaded with Windows? I don't mean Netflix, Spotify, etc. on your Start Menu.

Because Windows development uses a shared OS, it's easier to add all the features Enterprises want in the core Windows rather than adding that as extra features on top of a consumer Windows. Since you're not making money for MS, you're stuck with the unfriendly Enterprise crap.

This is why a lot of desktop customization has gone away, or become next to impossible. Things like CloudStore, AppX, relentless security virtualization extensions all exist for businesses customers. It's cheaper for MS to leave them in the Home/Pro releases, than separate them into a true Consumer vs. Enterprise edition.

W7 is lighter than W10/11 because it's not a cloud-centered OS. If you removed all the overhead that's designed to work in a cloud, modern Windows probably would be a much better platform. Bitching is fun, but it doesn't solve problems.

Go figure what you need to get stuff done, on whatever platform you're stuck on. That's what Power Users do.
 
garlin said:
W10/11 have struck a negative note with most non-Enterprise users. For this, there's a simple business reason.

Home consumers make NO MONEY for MS. Whatever it is, as the saying goes is a "rounding error". Enterprises with their $$$ support contracts, and the cloud is where all the revenue that makes MS stock so high. It's a recurring (steady) cash flow. You gamers pay virtually nothing (maybe your Dell/HP/Lenovo PC charged you an extra $40 for Windows, or gosh -- you "pirated LTSC". That puts you in the back of the priority list for Windows feature requirements.

What is with all the crap that's loaded with Windows? I don't mean Netflix, Spotify, etc. on your Start Menu.

Because Windows development uses a shared OS, it's easier to add all the features Enterprises want in the core Windows rather than adding that as extra features on top of a consumer Windows. Since you're not making money for MS, you're stuck with the unfriendly Enterprise crap.

This is why a lot of desktop customization has gone away, or become next to impossible. Things like CloudStore, AppX, relentless security virtualization extensions all exist for businesses customers. It's cheaper for MS to leave them in the Home/Pro releases, than separate them into a true Consumer vs. Enterprise edition.

W7 is lighter than W10/11 because it's not a cloud-centered OS. If you removed all the overhead that's designed to work in a cloud, modern Windows probably would be a much better platform. Bitching is fun, but it doesn't solve problems.

Go figure what you need to get stuff done, on whatever platform you're stuck on. That's what Power Users do.
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I miss the days when you paid for an operating system, I guess you still can but now it's free upgrades.

When income comes in at lease you give a darn about it.
 
garlin said:
Bitching is fun, but it doesn't solve problems.
Go figure what you need to get stuff done, on whatever platform you're stuck on. That's what Power Users do.
Click to expand...
users should quit wasting time bitchin and get polishing, they will actually accomplish something.
 
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garlin said:
W7 is lighter than W10/11 because it's not a cloud-centered OS.
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w7 and 8.1 are, there is no justification for the massive resources use in w10.

but
garlin said:
If you removed all the overhead that's designed to work in a cloud, modern Windows probably would be a much better platform.
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i can easily get w10 resources on a par with a default 7 install and a heavily modified 7. only the Handles are higher which as you point out(and AeonX did some time back) are part and parcel of the w10 infrastructure. even with them and heavily modified w10 is on a par with w7 for my stuff. w7 and w10 are split 50-50 with w10 getting 51 at times.
 
Necrosaro said:
When income comes in at lease you give a darn about it.
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Not always. When incomes goes down/stops coming in it can cause a Code Brown at X-corp HQ which will be the only time x-corp extracts its head from its fundamental and bloody well does something that they should have done beforehand.
Rule 1 of business, do not alienate your target audience.
 
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Hellbovine, agreed on almost all, just would like to point that the result of software progress is not just bloat for no purpose.
Security takes resources, and if someone is to try to hack Win7 vs Win11, it would be an obvious result, today it matters a bit more, being constantly connected.
Win11 is also nicer looking with more useful and upgraded features, supports newer hardware, more software hours went into it for one reason or another.
It's like users are crafting software with its feedback and wallets - most rather have Windows than a free unbloated Linux, for an obvious example.

On the semi-conspiracy angle, I do think that slower Windows equals more hardware sales, thus more Windows licenses, making sense from a business perspective.
But then easy to dispute with benchmark results, I didn't get the notion that Win7 is obviously faster than Win11, on a few generations older hardware.

Which then brings us to the minimalism and control, I do like a lite, preconfigured and in general unbloated OS, regardless what the numbers say.
I find a computer (and a smartphone) as an extension of self in this emerging digital age, and I don't want those to have unnecessary background or API abilities for security and efficiency (be it speed or needing to configure) reasons.

Funny story, it all started with a wrong soundcard driver, had to reinstall Win95 a million times, so got sick of that fragile feeling, treating OS like it can be unbootable at any point. I rather have my choices in a form of an independent preset, than storing manual steps inside a system backup of an older state.
Put anything installed on a second partition, and treat OS like it's temporary, take every reinstall as the opportunity to have newer and better configured system.
With the accumulated bloat over time, it's a feature, not a bug, to be able to reinstall more often due to automation.
Only obvious steps missing are AppData/ProgramData selective backup and restoration, and tray shortcuts pinning, still doing that manually and it hurts.
 
Hellbovine said:
Yeah totally agree, though I'd still encourage everyone to get at least a 3.0 Ghz since they are cheap enough. I'd rather have say a 4 core 3.0 Ghz processor than a 6 core 2.4 Ghz for gaming (if all other stats were equal I mean, and the only main difference was speed and cores). For other stuff like video/audio editing or general Windows usage I'd probably get the cores though.
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You are not considering Turbo Boost. I was surprised when I saw that the latest Intel processors have low clock frequencies but still have good performance in games, if you notice the clock frequency for Turbo Boost is usually much higher at around 4.0 GHz or more, I think that Intel relies on it to maintain good performance and at the same time manage to keep the processor's TDP low since they were late in reducing the processor's lithography by staying too long at 14 nm.

While AMD processors tend to have higher clocks probably because they've been at 7nm for a long time now.

But performance doesn't just depend on the clock, a processor can have a lower clock but have more IPC (instructions per cycle/clock) or other ways to increase performance, it can have a more efficient architecture that compensates for the lower clock, etc. So the most reliable thing is to look at the benchmark results and not just the clock as nuhi commented.
 
garlin said:
W7 is lighter than W10/11 because it's not a cloud-centered OS.
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I think this is not justification. Android is cloud-based from the beginning and has always been very light and efficient. Nothing makes me not think that the problem with Win10/11 is UWP. The acronym UWP stands for "Universal Windows Platform" ie the same app runs on the tablet, on the Xbox and maybe with luck on the PC :p something that runs anywhere doesn't run well anywhere.

The truth is that Microsoft no longer cares about personal computers (desktops), their focus is on companies, consoles and mobile.

Interestingly when Microsoft produced Windows Phone it was the same time as Windows 8.1, which even with all the apps and the Store managed to have better performance and features than Windows 7. They needed to optimize the OS to run on the weak mobile hardware of the time. Now they have the endless computing power of modern hardware for those who can afford it so it's much easier to make an OS without worrying about optimization.
 
Necrosaro said:
I miss the days when you paid for an operating system, I guess you still can but now it's free upgrades.

When income comes in at lease you give a darn about it.
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As they say "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product"
 
For the real-world apps, larger primary & secondary CPU caches are more helpful than instructions per clock cycle.

Unless you're doing repetitive math in a tight loop, most apps eventually have to fetch different data from main memory. Especially if you have multi-cores, since each core could be working on unrelated processes. It's the same reason why you want GPU's with extra RAM. Copying all that texture data to the local card means bypassing main memory.
 
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