monthly Steam Hardware Survey (opens in new tab) It provides insight into current gaming trends, showing you which products are gaining momentum and which are losing momentum. Statistical methods can be a bit opaque, but for now this is the best. August 2022 marks some important milestones in the GPU space and some notable trends in the CPU and OS space. Sprinkle with salt if necessary, but now it looks like this:
Nvidia RTX 30 Series Takes Pole Position
Starting with the best graphics cards, or at least the most popular options, we used the following data: Steam’s API page (opens in new tab) This is because it is more granular than the main GPU page. We also normalized the column values based on the totals, so all columns sum to 100%. (Without that adjustment, the column sum would be somewhere between 90.05% and 92.92%. This could be due to OS differences or other factors not immediately apparent.)
I have two big news. For starters, the Nvidia RTX 30-series cards surpassed other GPU families in overall survey share for the first time. Combined, all RTX 30-series GPUs accounted for 21.65% of the August total, a 1.90% increase compared to the July data. On the flip side, the GTX 10 series dropped by 2.15% from him and is currently stuck at 22.09%, but is still the second most popular GPU family. AMD’s RX 6000 series also showed him a slight rise of 0.03%, taking him to 1.84% overall. Declines were seen across all other GPU families.
(Before you ask: Yes, technically the RTX 20 series and GTX 16 series could be grouped under Turing’s banner. The problem is that the feature sets are completely different. RTX 20 is DXR and DLSS but not GTX 16, so we consider them a separate family.)
Another big news is that Nvidia’s GTX 1060 no longer ranks as the most popular single GPU. Well, technically, he still ranks first with 6.88% of the PCs surveyed, but the GTX 1650 has also risen to the top slot. More notably, the GTX 1060 is down 0.53% compared to his July, while the GTX 1650 is up 0.07%.
The RTX 3060 was the GPU with the biggest increase in share over the past month, with a 0.77% increase. “AMD Radeon Graphics” showed his second largest increase with 0.44%. The name could apply to various integrated graphics solutions, possibly including Valve’s own Steam Deck. The RTX 3050 climbed 0.31% to put him in third place. However, there’s plenty of room for variation, as evidenced by Intel’s UHD Graphics 620 ranking his fourth with a 0.23% share increase.
Major changes in OS share and CPU manufacturers
Two other interesting pieces of news are from the OS and CPU pages. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D also appears as a pure gaming solution, but the list of best CPUs for gaming has dominated the list of best CPUs for gaming ever since Intel’s Alder Lake part came out.
of steam CPU vendor share (opens in new tab) For a while Intel has been somewhat stable at the 67% mark and AMD at 33% mark, with ups and downs of a few percentage points. Last month, things turned in Intel’s favour, with AMD increasing his by 1.65% and his correspondingly decreasing by 1.67% (these are relative, not absolute, so they’re not the same).
How meaningful is that change? With AMD increasing in May and July, Intel in April, June, and now he in August, there’s probably a large margin of error in the sampling. It would make more sense if these numbers were skewed toward new PCs, which are more volatile than the PC market as a whole, but we’ll take it as interesting data and move on.
put things together from OS and API page (opens in new tab), Windows 11 also showed a significant increase, with overall share improving to 24.71%. Windows 10 still dominates all PCs, but it makes up his 71.76% of systems surveyed. Also interesting is that Windows 7 and Windows 8 saw a slight increase over the past month. We doubt many PCs are actually replacing Windows 10 with Windows 7, so it’s possible that these are just sampling variations, but we can’t say for sure.
I’m looking forward to
Over the past few months, there have been many reports of declining PC and component sales and bloating inventories. As a result, consumers and businesses cannot keep up with the speed of hardware production, and the near-term prospects are bleak.It comes from JPR report (opens in new tab) and IDC report (opens in new tab)As a result, hardware prices have fallen, and GPU retail prices continue to fall.
The situation isn’t helped by all the next-gen hardware that’s set to launch in the coming months.On the GPU side, Nvidia RTX 40-series cards are expected to arrive by October, while the AMD RX 7000 Series RDNA 3 GPUs could arrive in November. Intel’s Arc Alchemist GPU for desktops is also due for his October, with improved drivers over the Arc A380.
Equally exciting in the area of CPUs and motherboards. The AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs which will use the Zen 4 architecture will officially launch on September 27th along with 600-series chipsets and motherboards. This ushers in an era of DDR5 memory on both AMD and Intel platforms, but Intel continues to offer support for DDR4 instead.
The Intel Raptor Lake CPUs should also launch by October (rumored to launch on October 17th), adding more efficient cores across the stack and bringing new competition to AMD’s Zen 4 chips. The 13th Gen Intel CPUs will also feature a new 700-series chipset, but it will also be socket compatible with the LGA1700, meaning existing 600-series boards should work with his BIOS update.
It may be a few months before all of these changes show up in the Steam Hardware Survey, but we should start seeing new hardware in the next year.
