In a nutshell: December’s Steam survey results have arrived. The last month of the year is always an interesting one as it indicates popular Christmas gifts while also setting the stage for what’s ahead. The most obvious takeaway from December? 2024 really was AMD’s year – at least when it came to CPUs.
Starting with the processors category, December saw AMD reach another record-high share among participants of Valve’s survey. Team Red users were up 3.02% last month, taking its total to 38.7% as Intel fell slightly to 63.4%.
The fact almost 40% of participants (on Windows) now use an AMD CPU is as much a testament to the company’s success as it is to Intel’s failures. It wasn’t that long ago when AMD seemed destined never to grow its user share above 30%.
Zen 5 wasn’t exactly earth-shattering on its arrival, but still better received than Intel’s Arrow Lake Core Ultra Series 2 desktop CPUs. Then the Ryzen 7 9800X3D chip arrived, earning the title of “The New Gaming CPU King” in our review and proving so popular it sold out everywhere. The instability issues in Intel’s 13th- and 14th-generation processors have also impacted its sales of the older chips.
Moving to the GPU section, the biggest gains of the month were mostly shared between the RTX 40 series and 30 series xx60 and xx70 cards, with the RTX 4060 leading the pack. Somewhat surprisingly, the ancient GTX 1650 saw the fourth-highest gains.
AMD’s best-performing desktop card of the month was the Radeon RX 6600 in 27th place.
The RTX 3060 continues to be the most popular card among participants. Mid-range Ampere and Lovelace GPUs make up almost all of the top 11 spots, the only exceptions being the GTX 1650 in fourth and the GTX 2060 in tenth.
Elsewhere, Windows 11 is now comfortably the most popular OS in the survey. It pulled ahead another 2% to an almost 55% share in December as Windows 10 dropped to 42.3%.
With the older Windows version’s end-of-support date ten months away, expect this trend to continue. However, it’s a different story when looking at global users: Windows 10’s share has increased two months in a row to 62.7% while Windows 11 has declined to 34.1%.
Rounding up the rest of the survey, 16GB of RAM remains the most popular amount of system RAM but it’s lead is declining as second-place 32GB grows; a trend that is mirrored in the VRAM category.
Despite 1080p now mostly being limited to budget models or eSports monitors with blistering refresh rates, more than half (56.1%) the participants use this resolution. 1440p is the second most popular at 19.5%.
English saw a huge 9% jump in the languages category in December, cementing its position at the top with a 42.1% share as second-place Chinese fell slightly to 29.9%. Finally, most people still have more than 1TB of drive space, but only 100GB to 249GB free.
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