In brief: After an unexplained delay of almost a week, the Steam Hardware and Software survey results for January are here. Last month's winners were AMD, Windows 11, and the Oculus Quest 2, while it wasn't a good period for Nvidia's Ampere desktop line.
Diving into CPUs, AMD bounced back after suffering a decline in user numbers in December, which marked the first time it failed to steal share from Intel since August 2021. In January, 0.25% more survey participants were using team red's processors, pushing its overall share to 30.96%.
In the graphics card section, many of the trends we've seen over the past few months weren't present in January's results. The RTX 3000 desktop cards that have been increasing their user share didn't have the best time, with the 3070, 3060, and 3060 Ti all losing users. The RTX 3090 and 3070 Ti were unchanged, the RTX 3080 was up just 0.01%, and the RTX 3080 Ti increased 0.04%. The RTX 3050 Ti fared slightly better with its 0.06% rise, but the only desktop Ampere card to see significant gains was the vanilla RTX 3050, up 0.14%.
It was a different story for Ampere's laptop variants, the mobile RTX 3060 and 3080 were January's second- and third-best performers, up 0.32% and 0.16%, respectively. Only the GTX 1650 had a better month thanks to its 0.39% gain.
The top ten GPUs remain the same, apart from the laptop RTX 3060 moving higher. As for AMD, the Radeon RX 6700 XT is still the only RDNA 2 card in the main chart.
Elsewhere, Windows 11 continues to chip away at Windows 10's lead as 3.41% more participants opted for Microsoft's latest OS in January, taking its total to 13.56%. Additionally, more than a quarter of people now have 8GB of system RAM as those with 16GB declined.
The survey also reveals that 2.14% of all participants own a VR headset, almost half of which (46.02%) are Oculus Quest 2, now known as Meta Quest, models.