Valve has released its December Steam Hardware Survey statistics, showing that AMD processor market share is rapidly increasing and RAM capacity continues to increase, despite the global DRAM shortage. Tom's hardware reports this.
At the end of December, the market share of AMD processors in the Steam system reached 47.27%, an increase of 4.66% compared to the previous month. In the third quarter, the company surpassed the 40% mark, and within four months, the total increase was about 7%.
Intel maintains the official lead at 55.47%, but its market share continues to decline. Analysts note that AMD's transition to the AM5 platform with the abandonment of DDR4 support is contrary to Intel's strategy: Raptor Lake Refresh processors, which outperform Arrow Lake in some characteristics, are compatible with both DDR4 and DDR5.
Among Steam users, there is still high demand for AMD processors with Zen 3 microarchitecture. Even the outdated Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which has officially been discontinued, is still in demand on the secondary market and in some cases sells for more than the new Ryzen 7 9800X3D. Reputation factors are also increasing pressure on Intel's position – especially with the Raptor Lake chips identified for 2024. By comparison, just five years ago, Intel's market share in the Steam Hardware Survey reached 77%.
The dynamics of the RAM market deserves special attention. Despite severe global shortages and more than doubling consumer DRAM module prices, driven by high demand from the artificial intelligence industry, Steam users continue to aggressively increase their RAM capacity.
Thus, the proportion of systems with 32 GB memory increased to 39.07% (+2.11%), nearly equal to the 16 GB configuration, installed on 40.14% of computers. Experts do not rule out that it was shortages and rising prices that prompted some users to accelerate upgrades.
In other categories, no significant changes were noted. Windows 11 is still the dominant operating system with a 70.83% market share among Steam users, and the most popular graphics card is still the old and budget NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060, installed on 6.26% of gaming PCs.
Previously, Steam's main hits in 2025 were named.
