of Steam Hardware Survey (opens in new tab) has updated results for November 2022. There are some interesting pieces of information that can be extracted from the data. Not only is there a new top desktop card, (opens in new tab), but this is the first time this has happened in a long time. Of course, caveats apply. Elsewhere, integrated GPUs from Intel and AMD are climbing the ranks, while more gamers than ever are using Linux.
Geforce GTX 1650 (opens in new tab) It currently tops the GPU Popularity Contest. The low-end Turing card in 2019 climbed 0.66% month-on-month to climb to the top of the graphics card rankings with his 6.27% share of gamers. On the other hand, the GTX 1060, the former leader, fell 1.85% to 5.77%. The 1060 was launched in his 2016 and has been reigning since January 2018. Pascal cards are popular for their price/performance ratio and relatively low power consumption.
Of course, there are a lot of disclaimers that have to be thrown out. First, these are some big swings, and we suspect that Valve may have changed how they sampled, or got a very different sampling pattern. Second, the numbers for certain GPUs are combined while others are not. For example, the Steam hardware survey combined numbers for his 3GB and 6GB variants of the card with those for mobile and desktop variants. This applies to GTX 1650, including GDDR5 and GDDR6 variants, mobile and desktop versions.
Grouping the same entries, technically the RTX 3060 comes out on top. Desktop cards accounted for 3.41% and laptop versions accounted for a further 4.63% for a total of 8.04%. Still, ignoring the nitty-gritty details, it’s been a long time since we’ve seen another GPU at the top of our list.
The once top contender, the RTX 2060, also saw a significant drop in popularity at 1.46%, with 4.46% of respondents having one in their rig. Again, that’s a pretty big shift for his nearly four-year-old GPU in his month. In fact, many of the top 20 GPUs show fairly large fluctuations from month to month, so Valve’s sampling method is likely the culprit. Maybe you updated it to be more accurate. There is only hope.
As usual, the top 20 cards are in the serious Nvidia heavy zone, with only AMD’s Radeon Graphics integrated chip coming in at number 13. Intel has announced an integrated GPU, the Iris Xe used in its 11th and 12th generation chips, and the UHD graphics introduced in his Kaby Lake Refresh in 2017.
The only true top end card (opens in new tab) Top 20 is RTX 3080 (opens in new tab), there was a slight increase in 1.84% of survey respondents. AMD RX 580 (opens in new tab) It is located at number 21 just in front of the integrated Vega 8 GPU. The latest cards from all manufacturers (RTX 4090, RTX 4080, and Intel Arc A770/A750) are nowhere to be seen, but it’s usually months before newcomers show up.
When it comes to CPUs, Intel still reigns supreme with 67.1% of users, which is down almost 4% from its peak in October. AMD captured all of its market share, rising to 32.87%. The most common Intel processor speeds range from 2.3 to 2.69 GHz, suggesting laptops. (opens in new tab)AMD saw the largest cohort running CPUs between 3.3 and 3.69 GHz.
Apple Silicon chips take over from Intel for the first time in Mac Land, with Arm-based CPUs surpassing 50% on a 1.04% jump.Linux games are also becoming more popular, perhaps thanks to Steam Deck (opens in new tab), an increase of 0.16% means that 1.44% of the gamers who responded are using an open source OS. The most popular distro is Ubuntu, but Arch Linux, on which SteamOS is built, is his second.
Overall, there are some interesting changes, but Valve’s statistical methods remain ambiguous at best. Because there is no explanation of how the data is collected (e.g. some suspect that “new” or “changed” hardware is sampled more often than existing hardware) , we can only present results as-is. thing.
