What just happened? The latest Steam survey has arrived with some interesting results, especially in the GPU section. AMD, which barely gets a mention in this Nvidia-dominated category, saw one of its cards become April’s 8th-best performer. Team Red also gained CPU ground lost to Intel, while Windows 11 started to climb again.
The best-performing GPUs in April’s Steam survey were two laptop products, the RTX 4060 (up 0.50%) and RTX 3060 (up 0.39%). There was also a boost for a former number one, the GTX 1650, which was the month’s fourth-best performer thanks to a 0.25% increase.
There are a few new entries in the chart. The RTX 4080 Super and RTX 4070 Ti Super both arrived with a 0.21% share, while AMD will be glad to see its RX 6750 GRE 12GB land with a 0.15% share. Released in October last year, this Golden Rabbit Edition packs more VRAM and higher GPU performance than the 10GB version, which is essentially a Radeon RX 6700.
RTX 40xx-series cards made up 8 of the top 13 best-performing cards last month. The only one of these that wasn’t a laptop or Super variant was the RTX 4070 Ti.
Looking at the most popular GPUs, the RTX 3060 remains top despite a 1.21% decline while the GTX 1650 stays in second place. The highest non-laptop Lovelace card is the RTX 4060 in 11th. AMD’s most-popular discrete card is the Radeon RX 580 in 30th place, while its top RDNA 3 card is the Radeon RX 7900 XTX right down in 60th.
AMD will be pleased to learn that its CPU share has increased following two months of losses. It was up 2.24% to 33.46% while Intel fell to 66.51%. The Zen 5-based Ryzen 9000 series arrives later this year, likely boosting the number of AMD CPU users.
Elsewhere in the survey, Windows 11 recovered from its recent fall, increasing its user share by 3.54% to 45.15%. Windows 10, meanwhile, was down to 51%. The change is a contrast to the global picture, in which Windows 10’s massive 70% share keeps growing while Windows 11 fell for the second month in a row.
The rest of the survey shows that English once again passed Chinese to become the most spoken language among users last month. And while the majority of people have 8GB of VRAM in their machines’ GPUs, that figure is falling as the 16GB and higher crowd increases. 16GB is also the most common amount of system RAM by far.
The usual caveats with the Steam survey apply, including participation among users being voluntary, but it still gives a good idea of the PC hardware/software landscape.
