I’ve become used to Nvidia and AMD rocking up with new graphics cards on a consistently quick schedule: since 2008 and beginning with the GeForce 9000-series, Nvidia has released six generations of GPUs, and AMD has replied with three of its own, starting with the Radeon HD 4000-series.

Both firms put the finishing touches on their current ranges in the spring, and the trail’s gone quiet since. Nvidia has confirmed that it won’t release any new cards before 2012, and AMD hasn’t mentioned any potential release dates for its new Radeon HD 7000-series — presumably taking extra time to further tweak and perfect the new chips.

I can understand why Nvidia and AMD aren’t in any hurry to unveil new silicon — after all, evidence suggests that few games, and fewer gamers, will make use of the levels of power available from new cards: 2007’s Crysis is still one of the most demanding games around and, outside of Battlefield 3, few forthcoming games look like they’ll tax even last year’s graphics cards — after all, most are now ported from consoles.

Take a look at the Steam Hardware Survey from July 2011. The most popular ten graphics cards are, with no exceptions, old: top of the pile is the Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT, and it’s followed up by venerable old warhorses like the GeForce 8800 GT, Radeon HD 4870 and even the GeForce 8600 GT. The most popular current-generation chip, the GeForce GTX 560, is 25th on the list.

To find something truly high-end, keep on travelling down the list — the GTX 570 is the 31st most popular card and is used by a whopping 0.78% of Steam’s users, and the AMD Radeon HD 6950 is favoured by just 0.68%.

That’s the biggest PC gaming platform in the world and proof that, while AMD and Nvidia have spent the fast few years trying to beat each other with benchmarks, most users haven’t taken any notice. Instead, they’re too busy playing games on cards that are older and perfectly capable.

Perhaps the big guns have realised that this pixelated arms race is virtually pointless. Almost all users either aren’t bothered or can’t afford the latest chips, and the lack of big-name PC exclusives means that even a modest card will run rings around the latest games. Enthusiasts might enjoy the yearly releases, but board partners constantly tweak, overclock and improve chips to eke more performance out of older cores — and, if they’d like to run games across several screens, there’s always CrossFireX and SLI.

It looks like we won’t see any major graphics card releases until 2012 but, after several years of frenzied, benchmark-driven battling, I’m happy to wait — and it looks like most users are, too.

I loaded up Steam for the first time in a while last night and was promptly asked to participate in Valve’s ongoing hardware survey. I’ve done this before, and the results are always fascinating, so I jumped right in. A few clicks later, and a quick scan of my cobbled-together PC, and I got to see the breakdown of nearly 1.8million gamers’ systems – with some surprises.

Just 41% of polled users have made the much-needed step to a dual or quad-core processor – the norm in pretty much all new PC systems sold today – and 38% have shelled out on 2GB or more of RAM. Assuming a correllation between the two, that leaves a huge proportion of PC players who are still trundling along on 1GB of RAM or less and a single-core CPU.

Monitors are also an interesting point. Despite the fact that we almost never review them any more, and few manufacturers are even pushing new models today, a startling 75% of polled users are still playing on 4:3 monitors. Of those that have moved to widescreen, nearly 35% have opted for screens sized 24in or larger, while nearly 70% are at 20in or larger – if you’re going to upgrade, you may as well aim big.

The graphics card section is out of date, with no entries for ATI’s HD cards or Nvidia’s 9-series or faster, so can be ignored, but there are still more interesting stats to be gleaned from the survey:

• Intel leads AMD roughly 60-40
• An awful lot of people don’t upgrade their graphics drivers
• 1,396 polled gamers have less than 10GB of total hard disk space in their PC
• Nearly 3% of polled users still don’t have a DVD drive
• 8,105 Steam users speak a language called ‘Simplified Chinese’

And then there’s the old Vista issue. How many gamers do you think have upgraded to Microsoft’s flagship – with DirectX 10 it’s surely a gamer’s paradise, right? Wrong. Of the 1.8million Steam users polled, more than 80% are still running trusty old Windows XP. Ouch.

Admittedly, this Steam survey has been running for nearly a year now, and some of the categories and entries could certainly do with updating and starting afresh, but as a snapshot of a community made up almost entirely of gaming PC users it’s fascinating.

Journalists like us can sometimes get carried away in the constant hunt for bigger, faster, better, forgetting the fact that the vast majority of users don’t want to spend money on their PCs every five minutes, and that for many, running Crysis at Low settings is good enough to get enjoyment out of it (strange people).

But mostly a survey like this just highlights the problem that will always exist for PC and component manufacturers: that consumer inertia is just as powerful as technology in determining their bottom lines.