What just happened? Valve is starting 2024 with the first Steam hardware and software survey of the new year. It shouldn’t be too surprising to learn that December saw an uptick in the number of people with newer RTX 40-series cards, as well as several slightly older RTX 30-series GPUs, likely the result of holiday gifts. It was also one of those months where Intel outperformed AMD in the CPU section.
Starting with the Steam survey‘s GPU chart, the RTX 3060 continues to sit at the top of the pile thanks to its presence in 5.29% of participants’ machines. The card was the only one of the top six to experience any gains last month (0.25%). The only other entry in the top ten with a green number was the seventh-place RTX 3070, up 0.11% to take a 3.34% share.
Most of the top ten GPUs on the list are older products such as the RTX 2060 and the GTX 1650, a former number one. While their shares fell, December was a good period for Nvidia’s Lovelace and Ampere series. The RTX 4070, one of the few RTX 4000 cards we liked, was the best performer, rising 0.34%. The only 40-series not to see any gains was the RTX 4090, though it never lost any of its share, either. Meanwhile, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, AMD’s only RDNA 3 desktop card in the main GPU chart, was up by just 0.01%. It languishes in the lower half of the table with a 0.32% share.
Elsewhere in the survey, there was little change in the CPU section where Intel’s share increased by 0.21% to 66.2% as AMD’s fell by 0.22% to 33.6%. Team Blue’s 14th-gen Core CPU series landed in October, and the Core Ultra mobile CPUs arrived in December.
In the operating system section, both Windows 10 and 11 lost users, with the former still leading the pack despite an ever-decreasing margin. Steam no longer supports Windows 7, 8, and 8.1, so expect to see those older operating systems’ shares disappear completely soon enough – they’re already tiny.
The rest of the survey shows other potential holiday-related changes. The number of people with 32GB of RAM jumped by 1.25% to 24% as those with 16GB fell, though the latter amount is still the most popular (48.5%). The number of people using a FullHD display also declined slightly as 1440p, 4K, and 3440 x 1440 increased, possibly due to people receiving new monitors for Christmas. It seems the Meta Quest 3 was also a popular present, up 2.55% in the VR section.
