The guys at Unity have posted hardware stats for their web users, in a manner akin to how Valve publishes stats for theirs. The results may be surprising to folks still used to the core gamer market.

Among the key things:

• The single most popular video card, at 12% of installs, is the Intel 945.
• Dual Core CPUs are common — like, 44%.
• 1/4 of the machines run at DX7 level, and ~70% support 2.0 shaders.
• But almost 4% still run in software mode.
• 90% or so have graphics pixel fillrates of 2.0GP/s or less. That’s basically like a Radeon x1600, a card which sells on Amazon mostly used for between $45 and $120.
• Almost 80% are running without a DX10 card and without Vista; only 2.6% can even use DX10 (since it requires both).

It’s worth bearing in mind that Unity likely still isn’t as casual as the true mass market, despite their good penetration (this data had about a million users in it), since it requires a plugin install.

This speaks, of course, to designing for everywhere.