What just happened? It's the start of another month, which means Valve has released the results of its latest Steam survey. October was a good period for AMD and Linux, both of which reached record highs, while the three top GPUs constantly fighting for the number one spot switched places again.
We've seen the share of Steam survey participants who use Linux rise in recent times, mostly due to the Steam Deck and its Arch Linux-based SteamOS. Lunux's user share on the survey hit a milestone last month, passing the 3% mark for the first time ever. Arch Linux was the distro with the largest share, at 0.31%.
While Windows remains the dominant OS, its share declined slightly to 94.84%. Windows 11 continues to be the most popular version, reaching 63.5%, as Windows 10, which passed its end-of-life date on October 14, fell to 31%.
October saw AMD also reach a record high. Following a rare decline in CPU user share in August, Team Red bounced back a month later and has now hit its highest-ever figure: just over 42%. With Intel's share down to 57.8%, could Lisa Su's company eventually surpass Team Blue for the first time ever on the survey?
The GPU section shows the continuing switching of the number one spot between the RTX 3060, RTX 4060, and RTX 4060 Laptop. The RTX 4060 laptop GPU held the crown in September, only to be replaced by the RTX 3060 last month.
Looking at the best monthly performers, the RTX 5070 saw the largest gains, while the RTX 5060, 5060 Laptop, and 5060 Ti were also in the top ten. AMD's Radeon RX 7600 XT also had a good month, taking ninth place. But the overall number of AMD cards in the survey fell slightly in October, down from 18% to 17.9%.
Elsewhere in the survey, most participants have 16GB of RAM in their systems and GPUs with 8GB of VRAM. Graphics cards with that amount of memory aren't selling very well, especially compared to the same models with 16GB. Hence the recent reports of Nvidia telling partners to prioritize 16GB RTX 5060 Ti models over the 8GB variants.
Finally, the VR section shows that the Meta Quest 3 has held onto the top spot after it dethroned the Oculus Quest 2 in September. Its predecessor had topped the category since March 2021.