Steam Hardware Survey Trends Show Windows 11 Growth Plus Nvidia Graphics Dominance And VR Market Shifts
Latest Hardware Software stats published on Steam's platform database gives a great overview of how desktop gamers build their systems. These optional anonymous telemetry statistics show developers what the exact operating system, graphics cards and RAM configs that the player base is using, helping them to optimize their software. The current stats show a strong move towards modern operating systems and multi core configurations
We can see a shift in the user base towards modern operating systems with 69.76% of users running Windows 11 64 bit compared to the previous period, this is a clear jump of 2.02% of userbase who now use Windows 11. Older systems still declining, and newer ones pushing forwards, with RAM settings showing a good majority for 16GB, sitting at 41.14% of machines audited. In terms of storage there appears to be no signs of games stopping in terms of file size with over half the userbase having a total drive size of greater than 1TB (50.03%), with most users having between 100GB 249GB of space.
Graphics remain heavily consolidated towards the top few manufacturers with Nvidia holding over half the user database at 72.42% of all users on the platform. AMD holding a strong second at 19.13% with Intel trailing at 8.05% overall of all users. The single largest used graphics card is the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 desktop variant at 4.02%, closely followed by the laptop version of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 at 3.99% and the desktop Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 at 3.74%. However the newer Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 is rapidly gaining ground with 3.09% of active gamers.
The CPU statistics remain evenly split on Windows where Intel currently sits at 55.02% of the userbase, whereas on Linux the statistics look completely different and see AMD at 67.03% of all users. Multi core performance appears to be showing favor over high clock speeds with 6 core CPUs being the largest on the platform at 28.94% and 8 cores sitting in second with 27.31%.
Even with modern displays being released at higher resolutions, 1920x1080 resolution remains dominant at 51.89%. For those running a multi monitor setup the majority use a 3840x1080 resolution configuration at 48.90%, so it seems to seem people still value performance on lower resolutions more than the higher resolutions being introduced on modern hardware.
Virtual Reality remains dominated by standalone VR devices. With the Meta Quest 3 taking first place for a majority share of 28.63%, the older Meta Quest 2 also taking a huge chunk at 22.88% with the new Meta Quest 3S taking third at 13.23%, showing that tetherless VR is king.
