The big picture: Steam's Hardware Survey for September 2020 paints an interesting picture for AMD. The Red Team is pushing some of its most competitive CPUs in years, and while Zen was a slow burn with gamers early on, that doesn't appear to be the case anymore. Zen 2-based CPUs came a long way in closing the single-threaded performance gap against Intel's favored gaming chips. Zen 3 promises to ratchet that pressure up even further, and we're going to see even more gamers come aboard the good ship Ryzen.
Just ahead of AMD's Zen 3 reveal on October 8th, the latest Steam Hardware Survey has AMD laying claim to more than 25 percent of the CPU share among Steam's polled user base.
The September 2020 numbers come in at 25.75 percent for AMD, to be exact, marking a 0.84% improvement since August. Meanwhile, Intel still holds the lion's share at 74.24 percent, notching a 0.85% decline month-over-month. Still, AMD has seen continued growth among Steam's users for months – a trend that's unlikely to wane with Zen 3 right around the corner.
Elsewhere within the survey, we can see that Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1060 remains the most popular GPU, despite its slipping grip on the top spot. The GeForce GTX 1650 saw the largest boost in overall growth, with a 0.24% improvement over last month, bringing the card to a 3.76 percent share.
AMD's GPUs aren't faring as well; in fact, the only AMD card to crack the top ten is the Radeon RX 580 at 2.22 percent. Interestingly, AMD's RX 5500 XT showed up for the first time, with a market share of 0.15%.
Quad-core CPUs still hold the majority of the market share on Steam at 45.69 percent. However, quad-cores have been steadily on the decline, giving away market share to hexa-core CPUs over the last several months, as 6-core CPUs now account for 26.39 percent of the CPUs installed among Steam users.
Rounding out the notables, Windows 10 64-bit continues to lead as the most popular OS, 16GB continues to be the sweet spot for system RAM, and 1920 x 1080 is the most common resolution among PC gamers.