Steam Hardware Survey: Windows 11 wins, Intel loses

Valve recently released the Steam Hardware and Software Survey for May, which should give a pretty good glimpse into the tech of the average gamer. There are a few changes compared to the previous month of April. Among the Windows systems, Windows 11 was able to expand its market share by 0.6 percent, for example. At the same time, the share of Windows 10 grew by 0.06 percent – while all older Windows versions lost users. The sharpest decline was in Windows 7 (64-bit), which according to Steam lost 0.54 percentage points and is therefore only used by 2.50 percent of players.

Lots of movement in the CPU market

There are also some exciting developments in the hardware used. The change in processor market shares is particularly drastic: Intel lost 1.23 to 1.24 percent to AMD in May. If you were to take the “Steam Hardware Survey” alone as a benchmark, almost every third processor would currently be from AMD. However, it should be noted that the hardware survey is about existing hardware and not about new sales, so that only very limited conclusions can be drawn here.

There were only significantly smaller changes in the graphics cards used by gamers. Here, Nvidia and Intel were able to increase by 0.1 percentage points each at the expense of AMD. In May, 9.0 percent of all Steam players played with an Intel IGP, 14.9 percent with a Radeon GPU and 75.9 percent with an Nvidia graphics card.

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According to the hardware survey, there were also major changes in other areas, such as memory expansion. Here, systems with more than 1 TB of hard memory were able to increase by 2.2 percent and graphics cards with 8 GB by 1.3 percent. In the case of main memory, on the other hand, there was an increase in 32 GB systems in particular – here the share grew by 1.29 percent in the past month. However, more than half of the Steam PCs still only have 16 GB of RAM.

While many of the developments appear realistic, the numbers from Steam’s hardware and software survey should not be overstated. Since different computers are surveyed each month, this alone can result in fluctuations. This can be seen, for example, in the survey on the language used: Here, systems with simplified Chinese lost by 3.57 percent, which means that users from China are probably underrepresented compared to the previous month.

Source: Steam (Windows) via Windows Latest