In a nutshell: The latest Steam survey is here, bringing with it details on what hardware and software participants have in their machines. It was a good month for AMD, which saw some long-awaited CPU gains and the first Radeon RX 7xxx card to enter the chart. Elsewhere, the much-maligned RTX 4060 Ti was the third best performer during July.
Diving straight into the main GPU section of the survey, last month was another where the RTX 3060 continued what appears to be an inevitable climb to the top of the chart and displace the GTX 1650. Given the Ampere card's comparatively low price, availability on the second-hand market, and the fact that it can match or even exceed its successor, the mid-range option has proven to be very popular recently.
Looking at July's best performers, the RTX 3070 sits on top, followed by, strangely, the GeForce RTX T10-8, a professional graphics card from the Turing era. The new entry at number three might also come as a surprise: the RTX 4060 Ti – it will be the 8GB version as the 16GB model only arrived recently.
We gave the RTX 4060 Ti a score of just 60 in our review, noting that it definitely wasn't worth its $400 price. There were also stories about the stores opening late in Japan for the card's launch and only one person turning up to buy one.
Away from Nvidia, AMD will be happy to see that the first Radeon RX 7000-series card has landed in the main GPU chart since they first arrived in December. Only one of the three mainstream desktop products, the RX 7900 XTX, has made it, though the flagship was the seventh top performer.
AMD will also be glad to see its processors had a good July. After losing ground to Intel for three consecutive months, Team Red's chips saw a 1.16% rise, bringing its total share to 33.19%. Intel's 14th-gen Meteor Lake CPUs are expected to launch in the second half of the year, so it will be interesting to see how this shakes things up.
One section of the Steam survey that has been following the same pattern for some time now is the operating system chart. Windows 11 continues to make monthly gains while Windows 10 falls at a similar rate. Microsoft's latest OS was up by almost 1% in July, while its successor fell by 1.56%. That means Windows 10 is now used by 57.87% of participants and Windows 11 is preferred by 36.67%. Microsoft is killing off Windows 10 in 2025, so expect its decline to continue.
Rounding out the rest of the categories, 8GB remains the most popular amount of VRAM, rising by 1.63%, even though many modern games are struggling with insufficient video memory. The results also show that Full HD is the most common resolution by far, most people have 16GB of RAM in their machines, and despite falling slightly, 41% of VR headset owners who participated have an Oculus Quest 2.
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