Steam has published its latest monthly survey data (opens in new tab), gathered from peeking at gamer PCs around the globe. This month we are seeing some of the most substantial increases in figures for the mid-to-high-end GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards. Recent pricing action and improved availability appear to work some magic and inspire some upgrades. Elsewhere in the survey data, hexa-core processors have made a comeback (opens in new tab) in the CPU rankings, stealing the crown and knocking quad-core chips back into second place.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 and 3070 were the fastest climbers in May, holding first and second place in this chart. In the third and fourth pace, jointly, are the RTX 3060 and the old GTX 1070. Before you choke over the GTX 1070’s gains here, remember that such cards may be coming back into circulation as people sell their old GPUs to upgrade their PCs.
In previous months we lamented the sluggish growth of the RTX 30 series in the Steam Hardware Survey user data. It is straightforward to understand gamers holding off upgrading, though. Over H1 2022, we have seen some very encouraging new GPU pricing trends. PC gamers are buying again after holding their purses tight for many months.
With a potential glut of current gen GPUs forming, the Tom’s Hardware GPU editor Jarred Walton has guessed that we might see AMD and Nvidia delay their RDNA 3 and Ada Lovelace consumer GPU releases until a more opportune time.
The CPU cores war took a new turn in May, as hexacore chips, which first grasped a taste of the top spot this March, were back in pole position. Plucky quad cores managed to regain the top spot in April, but we feel that hexa-core CPUs will be convincing leaders for many months, if not multiple years, before octa-core chips or better start to go mainstream in PCs.
Steam also plots CPU usage by the manufacturer. For Windows gamers, AMD adoption was good last month, up 1.24%, while Intel users fell by roughly the same amount (it’s a two-horse race, with the barely noticeable presence of a Microsoft ARM CPU). While checking these charts, you can also see how fast Apple M1 adoption is climbing in macOS. In the latest survey, Apple Silicon has over 40% market share.
Last but not least, Linux gamers on Steam have been lapping up AMD CPUs. We may see Intel and AMD reach parity in popularity among Steam users gaming with this open-source OS installed.