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Windows 11 is gaining traction too.

Steam’s latest hardware survey (opens in new tab) has been released. The headline results for August 2022 show that Nvidia continues to dominate the market for GPUs, while Windows 11 is increasingly being adopted.

If we look at the GPU results, the venerable GTX 1060 remains the most widely used card, though it's slowly being retired from some rigs. The RTX 30 series is gaining market share—the 3060 held around 4-5% between May and July, yet jumped to well over 6% in August. The 3050, 3060 Ti, and 3070 also made gains. This is surely a result of falling prices, giving us an opportunity to finally upgrade our aging cards for a reasonable price.

The first AMD GPU is well down the list, and it's just integrated graphics. The highest ranked discrete AMD card is the RX 580 with 1.24% of market share. The highest-ranked current generation GPU is the RX 6600 XT, and it doesn't even crack 1%. AMD will be hoping its mid-range RDNA 3 models (opens in new tab) can do better.

The CPU results haven't really changed much in recent times. Intel maintains a roughly 2:1 advantage. AMD can't be too unhappy about that given the situation it found itself in a few years ago, where this much share would have been a dream. Quad and hex core CPUs are by far the most popular, though there is a trend away from quad core models in recent months.

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Of course, both AMD (opens in new tab) and Intel (opens in new tab) will release new CPU families in the coming weeks, so the Steam results over the next six months should be interesting.

The other interesting bit of info is the slight pickup in the move toward Windows 11. It's still nothing on the Windows 10 adoption rate, but ownership did increase from around 20 percent to 25%, so it's clear that Windows 10 use will continue to gradually decline.

1080p remains by far the most popular monitor resolution, though it dropped its share a little. Somewhat surprisingly, so did 1440p share which is where you’d expect upgraders to migrate. The answer to this is likely due to the increased number of lower-resolution laptop screens.

Steam's hardware survey isn’t a definitive analytical tool as not everyone plays games, but it doesn't give us a good insight into what's going on in the market. We await a reset in the coming months as new CPUs and GPUs find their way into the survey.

Chris' gaming experiences go back to the mid-nineties when he conned his parents into buying an 'educational PC' that was conveniently overpowered to play Doom and Tie Fighter. He developed a love of extreme overclocking that destroyed his savings despite the cheaper hardware on offer via his job at a PC store. To afford more LN2 he began moonlighting as a reviewer for VR-Zone before jumping the fence to work for MSI Australia. Since then, he's gone back to journalism, enthusiastically reviewing the latest and greatest components for PC & Tech Authority, PC Powerplay and currently Australian Personal Computer magazine and PC Gamer. Chris still puts far too many hours into Borderlands 3, always striving to become a more efficient killer.

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