In a nutshell: Steam’s December hardware and software survey was completed, which gave us an idea of what PC components the participants received during the holidays. The previous month was a good one for the Nvidia Ampere line of the latest generation, especially for the RTX 3060, which is rapidly climbing up the rating of the most popular GPUs.
A November Steam survey showed that the new graphics card topped the graphics processor chart for the first time since 2018. The GTX 1650 remained in first place in December despite a slight (-0.06%) decline, but it may soon feel pressure from a much newer and more powerful card: the RTX 3060.
RTX 3060 showed the biggest increase last month, rising by +0.47%. It was followed by its variant Ti (+0.31%).
It seems that Ampere was on the Christmas wish lists of many participants: RTX 3070 was third in performance with an increase of +0.28%, its Ti version was ninth (+0.08%), and RTX 3080 was thirteenth (+0.07%). %).
The RTX 4000 series has not yet appeared on the chart, which is not surprising given its price and lower-than-expected sales. The Radeon RX 7900 series, which admittedly only appeared in mid-December, is also missing. It will be interesting to see if the potentially faulty RX 7900 XTX evaporation chamber will affect its popularity.
In the CPU category, AMD’s long-term trend to increase and then decrease its share continued with a drop of 0.71%, resulting in its total share of 32.16%. A recent Mindfactory report showed that last month Team Red sold more processors than Intel — at least in Germany — so the company is unlikely to be concerned about the latest Steam data.
Elsewhere, Windows 11 continues to reduce the share of Windows 10 after the former received 0.44% more users, bringing its total share to 28.42%. And after many years of clinging, despite the termination of official (non-paid) support, Windows 7 continued to slide into obscurity on gaming machines with a decrease of -0.22%, reducing its share to just 1.66%.
The rest of the category leaders remain unchanged: Oculus Quest 2 is still the most popular VR headset today, most people use 1920 x 1080 resolution and have 8 GB of RAM (despite the fact that more and more games are asking for more) and a third of the participants have six physical CPU cores.
