Jukka Larja (roskakori2006.delete@this.gmail.com) on May 22, 2022 5:32 am wrote:
> You can get away with pretty much anything, if you just communicate the requirement clearly. AVX
> is currently in Steam Hardware Survey around 95 % supported (AVX2 is around 87 %, AVX-512 7.5 % by
> the way). Some of the remaining 5 % are dual-cores, some will have low-end GPU, so if the game requires
> strong CPU ("quad-core", in system requirements speak. Hard to be much more precise really) and GPU,
> it probably doesn't matter much if couple of percent of potential customers are lost.
>
> It does raise the question, is AVX enough of a reason to lose any customers though? Some people will always
> play on a system with less than minimal requirements, if the game just works without crashing.

The main CPU I've had in mind is the Pentium G6600 (2C4T 4.2 GHz Comet Lake), the fastest non-AVX CPU Intel has made since Westmere. Coincidentally, I was stuck with an i3-6100 the other week, which isn't that different (supports AVX2, but short 500 MHz). Gaming on 2C (total perf) was surprisingly OK for mid-weight games, but the 4T (contention) part was terrible on pretty much anything DX11 even with an AMD GPU (much less CPU time used in the driver than Nvidia). That's understandable, I'd hate to try to map everything going on in a typical modern game onto 4T. If it's a heavier game with threading that you know isn't going to map sanely onto 4T anyway, I don't think there'd be much harm in excluding that class of CPU.

AES-NI could narrow down the CPUs in use a bit more:

1.31% are pre-Nehalem, pre-Silvermont, or pre-Bulldozer (no SSE4.2)
2.75% are either Nehalem or pre-Skylake Pentiums/Celerons (SSE4.2 but no AES-NI)
1.13% are either Westmere, Silvermont+ Atoms, or Skylake+ Pentiums/Celerons (AES-NI but no AVX)

I've also been keeping notes on hwsurvey numbers back to May 2019, and the portion not supporting AVX has dropped from 11.17% to 5.19% in that time.