AMD And Windows 11 Notch Big Steam Survey Gains To Start 2026
Reflecting back on a year of gaming, Steam's final hardware and software survey of 2025 indicates a couple of interesting trends as 2026 gets underway. One of this is AMD's ability to continue chipping away at Intel's lead, and on the software side, Windows 11 is adding even more distance between itself and Windows 10, at least among Steam users.
It's important to note that Steam's data is not indicative of the market as a whole. The monthly surveys also don't take into consideration the entire gaming community, or even Steam's full userbase. However, the surveys do provide one of the best snapshots of trends in the gaming sector, given that Steam is the dominant platform for playing games.
So, what can we see in the December 2025 survey results? On the hardware side, AMD ended the year with a 47.27% share of Steam users who participated in the survey, which is a 4.66% gain from the previous month and up from 40.16% in August. Meanwhile, Intel slipped to 55.47%, which is down from nearly 60% back in August (59.76%).
These numbers can fluctuate depending on which users get invited to participate, but the trend over time is clear—AMD is not only gaining ground on Intel, it's starting to close the gap.
The implication for Intel is that it has work to do in order to win over and retain gamers on its platforms. One of the challenges it faces is that only AMD is offering CPU models with stacked 3D V-Cache. The additional L3 cache found on chips such as the Ryzen 7 9800X3D gives gaming a tangible performance boost.
While Intel doesn't have an answer for AMD's Ryzen X3D processors, it presumably soon will. Intel's upcoming Nova Lake chips are expected to debut what Intel is calling bLLC (Big Last Level Cache), which is essentially its own take on stacked cache. The extra on-package SRAM purportedly lives in the processor's base tile and would act much like AMD's 3D V-Cache to effectively reduce latency and boost game performance.
Rumor has it that Nova Lake could rock up to 52 cores at the top end. AMD is not standing pat, however, and on the topic of rumors, there's chatter of AMD's X3D models based on Zen 6 could flex up to 288MB of L3 cache. If these rumors pan out, it should be a fun year!
Pivoting to software, among Windows users on Steam, Windows 11 increased by 5.24% to claim a 70.83% share of Steam users surveyed in December, compared to 26.70% for Windows 10. This is similar to the breakdown by the auditors at Statcounter, who show Windows 11 sitting at a 60.62% share of Windows users, versus 35.65% for Windows 10.
Check out the latest Steam survey for more trends in gaming.
