In brief: August's Steam survey has arrived, and there's been a trend reversal we've not seen since February: AMD lost ground to Intel in the CPU section. It was also another month where the top GPU changed, while Windows 11 continues to pull ahead in the OS category.
2025 has seen Steam survey participants' most popular GPU alternate between the RTX 3060, RTX 4060, and RTX 4060 laptop. The RTX 3060 took the lead again in July, but its Lovelace successor regained the top spot in August. The RTX 4060 also saw the largest gains of the month (0.46%).
The top 11 GPUs are made up of xx60 and xx70 products and their variants, with the only outliers being the RTX 3050 in fifth and the GTX 1650's enduring popularity keeping it in fourth place.
Looking at user-share gains for the month, the RTX 5060 sits behind the RTX 4060 with a 0.41% increase, while the 4060's laptop version is in third place. AMD's best performers were the RX 7800 XT (0.08%) and RX 7600 XT (0.07%) in 14th and 15th place, respectively. Team Red's highest dedicated GPU in the main chart is the Radeon RX 6600 in 30th position.
The section remains dominated by Nvidia, with just under 75% of all GPUs from Team Green, while AMD holds a 17.3% share.
One area where AMD has been making huge strides is the Steam survey's CPU section. With gamers loving the company's Ryzen 7 9800X3D chip – combined with Intel's disappointing Arrow Lake desktop series – AMD has seen its user share shoot up past 40% in recent months. But for the first time since February, AMD's CPU share dropped in August (by 0.23%) while Intel made gains.
According to Statcounter, Windows 11 had a rare fall in global users last month as Windows 10 made gains. But the newer OS continued its surge in the Steam survey, increasing another 0.49% to take it to 60.39% overall. Windows 10 fell slightly to 35.09%, a trend expected to continue now that we're just over a month away from its October 14 end-of-support date.
Looking at the rest of the survey, 8GB remains the most popular amount of VRAM, though games are increasingly calling for more if you want higher resolution/graphics settings. 16GB is the most common amount of RAM, but it looks as if 32GB will take its place at some point in the next 12 months.