author: Michael Kulakowski
Steam Hardware Survey - December 2018
Steam platform has published the results of the December hardware survey of its users, which is based on data shared by them.
Steam remains unquestionably the largest gaming platform in the world. For years, the service has been collecting data of tens of millions of users, regularly publishing information about their computers and software. This information in an interesting way illustrates trends among players and changes in the hardware market. Let's take a look at the latest survey results.
The most popular operating system among Steam users remains Windows 10 – exactly 63.79 percent of players use it every day. According to previous surveys, Windows 10, which is not surprisingly gradually strengthening its leading position compared to September, gains nearly four percent of the market share. The second place was taken by Windows 7 (64-bit version), which is now used by 26.08 percent of PC gaming fans.
As far as processors are concerned, 82.73 percent of people on Steam have Intel chips in their computers. Compared to April, however, in December AMD gained one percent of respondents, achieving a result of 17.73%. The most popular among users remain quad-core processors - more than half of the players currently own them.
Similar to Intel, Nvidia has a constant advantage in the graphics card segment. The company's cards are used by 74.18% of respondents. The unquestionable leader among GPUs is the GeForce GTX 1060 with 14.80 percent of gamers, followed by the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti and GTX 1050. The first dedicated chip from AMD (AMD Radeon RX 580) was only 27th with a 0.64 percent share.
Still the most popular amount of RAM among Steam users is 8 GB, but a group of 16 GB already lacks just over six percent to gain an advantage (38.04 percent to 31.29 percent). 4K gaming is still a niche, with only 1.42 percent of Steam users playing at this resolution. In this category, 1080p rules indivisibly, and more than 60 percent of players now use screens of this type. As far as VR goggles are concerned, there have been no major changes. Oculus Rift remains the most popular headset (0.37 percent of account holders), followed by Valve HTC Vive (0.33 percent).