Steam Survey Gaming Trends: AMD Chips Away At Intel & Windows 11 Dominates
We're a few days into October and that means there is another Steam survey to digest (as we like to do), the latest of which highlights a couple of interesting albeit not unexpected trends. One of those trends is AMD continue to chip away at Intel's lead. AMD managed to gain more ground in September among Steam gamers, pushing Intel's presence to a record low.
Before we dig, let's go over the usual caveats. For one, Valve's survey is not an all-inclusive snapshot of the market. It's solely focused on Steam users, which is significant but nowhere near the full scope of users who buy PC hardware.
We must also point out that these monthly surveys do not represent the entirety of Steam's user-base, just those who have been selected and, if chosen, opted into the platform's data collection. Partially for this reason, results can be skewed.
Still, it's one of the best audits of the PC gaming space available, and what September's results tell is that AMD managed to narrow the gap even further. According to the latest survey, 41.31% of Steam gamers are rocking AMD processors, which is a 1.15% increase from the previous month.
The good news for Intel is that despite declining 1.15% to a 58.61% share among Steam users who were pinged, it still dominates. That said, it's been a steady decline. Back in May, for example, Intel's share was listed as 60.44%.
These stats are not likely outliers. If you look at the best selling CPUs on Amazon, for example, you'll find that Ryzen chips occupy the top 10 spots, and 17 of the top 20 best sellers. AMD's chips with 3D V-Cache are performing particularly well, with the Ryzen 7 7800X3D ($359, 20% off) currently the top seller, followed by the Ryzen 7 9800X3D ($476.99) in second place. The flagship Ryzen 9 9950X3D ($669.98) sits in sixth place.
None of this means you should count Intel out. While the implementation of 3D V-Cache has proven both effective for gaming and popular among gamers, Intel could be tooling its future chips with something similar, starting with Nova Lake. Intel's also been getting a lot of votes of confidence on its foundry business, including a $5 billion investment by NVIDIA and multi-generation partnership to co-develop custom data center and PC products with RTX graphics. Intel may even score AMD as a customer.
Outside of the chip race, the latest Steam survey also highlights an uptick in Windows 11, which increased its share by 2.65%. According to the survey, just over 63% of Steam gamers are rocking Windows 11.
This comes as the deadline for free Windows 10 support nears its end. On Steam, Windows 10 saw its share decrease 2.9% to just under a third of users, at 32.18%. That's still sizable, but it's clear that gamers clinging to Windows 10 are begin to transition to Windows 11 at a greater pace than before.
