Shortly: The latest Steam poll has arrived, giving us an idea of what hardware and software is currently popular in gaming devices. August was a good month for laptops, with the RTX 4060 finally breaking through the main charts. AMD CPUs also had a good time, while Windows 11 can now be found in almost 4 out of 10 participant PCs.
With view on Steam Polls In the overall GPU chart, the RTX 4060 laptop and the RTX 3060 laptop showed by far the best results in August. The Ampere GPU is now in third place on the main chart and was the only one to see gains in the top five last month.
There were two new arrivals in August: another mobile product in the form of the laptop GPU RTX 4070 and the desktop RTX 4060. The latter comes after the RTX 4060 Ti entered the main charts in July. Both desktop cards have received a lot of criticism from reviewers and gamers since their launch, but it seems at least some people are buying them.
In CPUs, August was the second month in a row that AMD closed the gap to Intel. Team Red rose 0.24% to capture a 33.43% share. Of course, around two-thirds of the survey participants still prefer Intel. Chipzilla likely expects that number to increase once the Raptor Lake Refresh CPUs launch, but the 14th-gen processors are reportedly said to cost 15% more than their predecessors, and in most cases only offer minor performance gains.
Another thing that’s steadily gaining ground in the poll is Windows 11. Microsoft’s latest operating system may not be seeing the global adoption rate that Redmond would like, but gamers seem to be embracing it. Windows 11 was up 2.55% to 39.22% in August, while Windows 10 was down 1.89% to 55.98%. At this rate, Windows 11 is expected to overtake its predecessor later this year.
Windows 11 was the only version of the operating system to see gains last month; Windows 7 remains alive with a 0.08% share, but will likely disappear from the chart soon.
Elsewhere, 16GB is still by far the most popular system memory size, while 8GB is the most common VRAM size, a fact many game makers seem to ignore these days. The total hard drive space of most participants is over 1TB, which is also becoming a necessity thanks to modern games, and the majority have only 100GB to 250GB of free space left.