In brief: It's the start of a new month, which means Valve has just released the latest Steam Software and Hardware survey results. There were a few surprising stats from last month, including a new most-popular language, a massive jump in users for Intel, and a continuing resurgence by Windows 10.
Starting as we always do with the graphics card category, October saw the RTX 3060 cement its position at the number one spot having stolen the GTX 1650's crown in September. The Ampere GPU was once again the month's top performer, up 3.65%, and is now found in close to 10% of survey participants' machines.
Following the RTX 3060 on the best-performers list is another Ampere entry, the RTX 3070, which has now moved into third place overall. Sitting in fourth place is the RTX 2060. Having first launched in January 2019, the Turing card increased its user base by 1.38% in October and is now second overall.
The top-performing GPUs among steam survey participants in October
Looking at Lovelace, the RTX 4060 and 4070 had a good month with increases of 1.25% and 1.19%, respectively. The RTX 4080 and 4070 Ti also gained more users. Sadly for AMD, its only RDNA 3 card in the main chart, the RX 7900 XTX, actually lost user share. It sits just 10 places off the very bottom of the main GPU chart with a 0.19% share.
It was even worse news for AMD in the CPU chart. Having spent most of this year closing the large gap on Intel, Team Red processor users fell a massive 5.61% in October, one of the largest drops we've seen in a while. This follows a 2.24% dip in September, leaving AMD with a user share of just over 25%. Intel has only just released its Raptor Lake Refresh chips, too, so don't be surprised to see the gap widen next month.
One of the biggest (but not the biggest) changes last month was in the operating system section. Almost 40% of participants preferred Windows 11 in August's survey, but Microsoft's latest OS fell 1.79% a month later and has now crashed by a massive 6.9%. Windows 10, meanwhile, is up 7.61% for an overall total share of 65%. It seems the Redmond company's quest to get everyone onto Windows 11 needs an extra push.
The biggest change in October, and probably the most surprising, was in the languages section. English has been the most popular language for a long time, but simplified Chinese jumped almost 14% last month to give it an overall lead of almost 46%. Exactly why this happened isn't clear, but one could speculate that more people in China took part in last month's survey.
There have been other times where some of the Steam survey results seemed a little off. March was a prime example, when Chinese became the top language and Windows 11 plummeted. Things returned to normal a month later, so it will be interesting to see if October proves to be another temporary anomaly.