What just happened? The latest Steam survey has arrived, and it’s not the best news for AMD. Team Red’s processors lost more user share to Intel for the second month in a row – something that has become a rarity – while its most popular RDNA 3 GPU has fewer users than Nvidia’s RTX 4080 and expensive RTX 4090.
Starting with the Steam survey‘s best-performing GPUs chart, March was a good month for Nvidia’s newer mid- to higher-end cards. Seven of the top eight were variants of RTX 3060/70 and RTX 4060/70 products, with the RTX 3060 taking the number one spot. The RTX 4080 and 4090 didn’t fare so well, with growth either flat or negative. The RTX 2070 and 2080 saw some gains, too.
Looking at the most popular GPUs, the RTX 3060 remains king, cementing its position at the top with a 0.75% user share increase. March’s results suggest a preference among survey participants for newer 3000- and 4000-series cards, which mostly saw gains, unlike the older GPUs.
AMD remains in the shadow of rival Nvidia. The company’s highest dedicated graphics card is the Radeon RX 580 in 29th position. Its most popular RDNA 3 GPU, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, is in the bottom half of the table with a user share of 0.34%. For comparison, the RTX 4080 has a 0.80% share and the RTX 4090 is at 0.91%.
AMD struggled in the CPU section last month, too. The firm reached its highest-ever user share in this category in January (34.25%), but has since fallen to 31.22% after losing users for the second month in a row. Intel, meanwhile, is edging closer to the 70% and higher share it had held for so long.
March also marked the second month in a row that Windows 10’s user share increased. The older OS jumped 2.7% in February as Windows 11 fell 2.28%. Last month, Windows 10 was up 0.21% to 54.4% as its successor fell 0.35% to 41.6%. Valve dropped Steam support for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 in January, but versions 7 and 8 are still hanging on. Elsewhere, Linux is now used by almost 2% of survey participants, with Arch Linux 64-bit the most popular distro.
One section of the survey that seems to change leader regularly is the most popular languages category. Simplified Chinese passed English to take the top spot in February and remained there during March, though only by a small margin.
Looking at other parts of the survey, 8GB is the most common amount of VRAM while 16GB is the most popular amount of RAM, despite some games starting to demand more of both these days. 1080p is the most common monitor resolution, most participants have six physical CPUs, and the majority of people have 100GB to 249GB drive space free.
