In a nutshell: The December Steam survey results have arrived. The last month of the year is always an interesting month as it signals popular Christmas gifts and at the same time sets the stage for what lies ahead. The most obvious takeaway from December? 2024 was truly AMD’s year – at least when it came to CPUs.
Starting with the processor category, AMD reached another record high among participants in December Valve’s research. Team Red users rose 3.02% last month, bringing the total to 38.7%, while Intel fell slightly to 63.4%.
The fact that nearly 40% of participants (on Windows) are now using an AMD CPU is as much a testament to the company’s success as it is to Intel’s failures. It wasn’t long ago that AMD seemed destined to never grow its user share above 30%.
Zen 5 itself wasn’t exactly earth-shattering arrivalbut still better received than Intel’s Arrow Lake Core Ultra Series 2 desktop CPUs. Then the Ryzen 7 9800X3D chip arrived, earning the title “The New Gaming CPU King” in our judgement and it turns out to be so popular sold out everywhere. The instability problems in Intel’s 13th and 14th generation processors have also impacted sales of the older chips.
In the GPU section, the biggest gains of the month were mainly shared between the RTX 40 series and the 30 series xx60 and xx70 cards, with the RTX 4060 leading the way. Somewhat surprisingly, the old GTX 1650 posted the fourth highest gain.
AMD’s best performing desktop card of the month was the Radeon RX 6600 in 27th place.
The RTX 3060 remains the most popular card among participants. Mid-range Ampere and Lovelace GPUs make up almost all of the top 11 positions, with the only exceptions being the GTX 1650 in fourth place and the GTX 2060 in tenth.
Elsewhere, Windows 11 is now comfortably the most popular operating system in the survey. It rose another 2% to a nearly 55% share in December, when Windows 10 fell to 42.3%.
Now that the support date for the older Windows version has passed ten months, you can expect this trend to continue. Looking at global users, however, it’s a different story: Windows 10’s share has risen two months in a row to 62.7%, while Windows 11 has fallen to 34.1%.
Completing the rest of the research, 16 GB of RAM remains the most popular amount of system RAM, but the lead diminishes as 32 GB grows into second place; a trend reflected in the VRAM category.
Although 1080p is now mainly limited to budget models or eSports monitors with blistering refresh rates, more than half (56.1%) of participants use this resolution. 1440p is the second most popular at 19.5%.
English saw a huge increase of 9% in the language category in December, strengthening its position at the top with a 42.1% share, while second-place Chinese fell slightly to 29.9%. Finally, most people still have more than 1 TB of disk space, but only 100 GB to 249 GB free.