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Valve first came up with the Steam Hardware Survey more than 20 years ago because it wanted to know what specs it should target for Half-Life 2
The first public Steam Hardware Survey came in April 2003, but there were private antecedents used by Valve earlier.
"During development, we faced numerous decisions influenced by our choice of minimum spec—the least powerful CPU and GPU combination that would still deliver a good experience for customers," Stelly said in a commentary track located in the level Route Kanal. That's something that often seems forgotten when people pine for the good old days of PC hardware: There were exciting graphical breakthroughs all the time, but compatibility was not a given like it is today, with 3Dfx, ATI, Nvidia, 3DLabs, Xabre, and Matrox cards all floating around in the late '90s and early '00s and rarely playing nice with every single game. It's still a dead heat between Intel and AMD for processors, but ARM is waiting in the wings to potentially overtake x86, and the numbers for core counts, storage, RAM, and clock speeds are all vastly higher.
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