Towards the end of 2020, we asked you for hardware statistics to better understand what kind of hardware most of you are using, and what we can do to optimize Gaea to those specs.
Just like in 2019, I had promised that we will be very transparent with you and tell you what we learned from these anonymous statistics. From the thousands of results submitted so far, we collected 3000 random samples. Below are the top 10 results from those samples by category.
CPU
AMD adoption has increased about 15% in 2020.
Individual processor type data is quite fragmented given the many different processors Intel has in the market. But we did find AMD Ryzen adoption is high among Gaea users, but Threadrippers still remain rare. Core i7 (across various generations) still remains the most used processor.
Majority of Gaea users seem to have between 8 and 16 cores. Some of you brave people are using 2 and 4 core machines. Salute to you and your patience! 🙂
GPU
On the GPU side, you guys mostly seem to be using NVidia GPUs, with a small but significant percentage relying on Intel UHD Graphics.
RAM
Just like last year, 16 and 32 GB machines represent the majority, but 64GB and 128 GB machines are on the rise (>20% since 2019).
Operating System
Most of you are on Windows 10, which is a good thing as later in 2021, we will be dropping support for Windows 7 completely. I know this will not be popular with the holdouts, but there is no room for argument. Windows 7 is extremely outdated, and officially unsupported by Microsoft themselves. We don't see the point in support Win7 anymore and having to forgo modern tech that's available on Windows 10.
Display
1080p still rules as the standard resolution for the primary monitor for almost 60% of people. >2K resolutions are on the rise, though.
Tablets
Tablet capabilities were one of the crucial components of this survey. We want to add more tablet functionality, but wanted to understand what hardware capabilities everyone had. Less than 25% of users use a tablet, however, based on direct feedback we also know that most tablet/stlus users tend to have heavier use of Gaea.
We will be overhauling our tablet support in Gaea 1.3, adding several tablet friendly features and better support for hardware buttons on Wacom and XP-Pen devices.
Thank you all for participating in the survey! What you see here is a small snippet of all the details we learned - especially things such as CPU capabilities and what kind of algorithmic processing we should support.