November Steam survey: AMD CPUs and Linux hit new records as RTX 5000 series surges

[midian182]

In brief: Valve has released the latest Steam hardware survey, and it's yet another case of a new month, a new top GPU. A more interesting takeaway from November is how popular the RTX 5000 line was over the last 30 days. Plus, for the third consecutive month, AMD has reached a record high in the CPU category, getting ever closer to the 50%-share milestone in its battle with Intel.

Starting with the GPU section, much of this year has seen the RTX 3060, RTX 4060, and RTX 4060 Laptop GPU swapping places at the top. Last month was the RTX 3060's turn, this month it's the RTX 4060 laptop that's most popular among survey participants.

Most popular GPUs among Steam survey participants during November

November was a great month for Nvidia's Blackwell lineup. The five cards that saw the largest gains last month were all from the RTX 50xx series, with the RTX 5070 leading the pack through a 0.35% jump. It means the 5070 is now just outside of the top ten on the main chart, though it's actually in tenth spot when counting only dedicated GPUs.

Best-performing GPUs among Steam survey participants during November

Moving to CPUs, AMD has reached a record high in its battle for user share against Intel. The only months that Team Red's share briefly declined in 2025 were January, February, and August – and it bounced back every time.

Lisa Su's firm was up 0.52% to 45.61% last month, putting it on track to hit the 50% milestone next year sometime. AMD is crushing Intel in CPU sales both in the US and abroad, so its share increase on Valve's chart isn't a surprise.

In the OS section, Windows 11's share (65.6%) keeps rising at the expense of Windows 10, which is now down to 29%. There little doubt the older OS won't disappear anytime soon – there are still some participants using Windows 7, which Steam stopped supporting at the start of 2024.

Linux's user share also reached a new record high in November, climbing to 3.2%. Its surge this year is mostly due to the Steam Deck and its Arch Linux-based SteamOS – Arch Linux was the distro with the largest share (0.32%).

RAM prices have been comically high recently due to data centers gobbling up all the DRAM; there are even calls for a gamer boycott. The situation has yet to be reflected in the Steam survey, which saw an increase in the number of participants with 32GB or more in their machines last month – maybe they're trying to take advantage before things get worse?

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November Steam survey: AMD CPUs and Linux hit new records as RTX 5000 series surges

 

[Aus spot]

I boycotted new GPU’s after the rtx2000 series.

More a could not justify the expense boycott, but amounts to the same thing, no money from me.

But plenty of people clearly have money to burn.

 

[Rapob]

I hope Linux gaming will get better but the real problem is anti-cheat and multiplayer in general.

Linux works "fine" for many single player games but is absolute hell for most multiplayer games. If Valve (frontrunner for Linux gaming) can get around this huge problem, it will be big.

Arch based distros getting more and more popular as we speak, for gamers especially. Steam OS changed to Arch in version 3. Rolling updates is the way to go for gaming. Prefer Debian for servers obviously but running Arch on my laptop now, following the gaming progress. Tons of games work well, some even perform better in Linux than in Windows 10/11, but again, multiplayer is the real problem.

Microsoft should really take this seriously. I hope they will make an official Windows 11 "Gaming Edition" or something completely cut-down soon. Adding more and more useless crap which eats ressources, is just pushing more users to Linux.

Microsoft bought tons of game developers in the last years. Big ones too. I think their goal is to make games Windows Exclusive, as they seem to abandon Xbox more and more. They probably want to trap gamers on Windows, as Linux gets better and better for gaming.