In a nutshell: It’s the start of a new month, and that means an updated Steam Survey. November saw AMD continue its trend of slowly chipping away at Intel’s processor lead. And while the number of people buying new graphics cards remains low, understandably, every one of the Ampere line experienced slight gains. It was also a very good month for Windows 11.
In the CPU category, AMD continued to increase its user share. The total number of red processors in survey participants’ computers rose to 31.53% last month, marking a jump of +0.69%, which coincidentally is the same increase we saw between September and October. AMD will no doubt be pleased, especially as Alder Lake launched on November 4, but will the full impact of Intel’s latest chips be felt in December’s results?
Moving onto GPUs, there was little change at the top of the chart as the GTX 1060 keeps the top spot it will have occupied for three years as of next month—the last number one card was the GTX 750 Ti. However, the GTX 1650 is catching up thanks to a +0.16% increase.
November’s survey was another excellent showing for Ampere. All of Nvidia’s most recent cards saw their user shares increase—the RTX 3060 Laptop GPU was the month’s top-performer with +0.41%—even the expensive and elusive RTX 3090 went up slightly (+0.01%). It seems that despite their price and availability issues, people are still managing to buy the latest graphics cards.
As for AMD, the Radeon RX 6700 XT (0.20%) remains the only RDNA 2 card with enough share to be included in the main chart. But the Vulkan Systems section shows both the Radeon RX 6900 XT and Radeon RX 6800 XT experiencing small gains, so they could soon reach the required 0.15% to enter the GPU section, assuming the reported price increase doesn’t impact sales even more.
Elsewhere, Windows 10 experienced a large drop as over 6% of participants moved to Windows 11. Microsoft’s latest OS now has an 8.28% share, having entered the survey only last month with 1.82%. The figures line up with a report from November showing that around 5% of PC users were running Windows 11.