What just happened? Valve has released its latest Steam Hardware and Software survey---a little later this month, due to the Labor Day Holiday. Some of the main takeaways for August was that AMD's CPU share is continuing to rise, and while the top three graphics cards remain the same, the RTX series keeps making gains.
Starting with processors, it appears that AMD has turned a corner. After several months of Intel increasing its share among Steam users while its rival went in the opposite direction, the trends reversed back in July and continued in August. Intel now has an 81 percent share among survey participants, while AMD has 19 percent. It's likely that the popular Ryzen 3000 processors have contributed to this reversal and will continue to do so in the future.
When it comes to video cards, the top three most popular choices---GTX 1060, 1050 Ti, and 1050---all retained their positions despite experiencing declines.
Some of the biggest increases last month were for the GTX 1070 (0.21 percent) and GTX 1080 (0.20 percent) cards that are in fourth and fifth position, respectively. Many people are snapping up these products as prices in the second-hand market fall due to gamers upgrading and selling their older cards.
The other effect of consumers upgrading is that the Nvidia's RTX line is growing in popularity, albeit it at a slow and steady pace. The RTX 2070 remains the most common, found in 1.39 percent of Steam survey participants' machines. Next is the RTX 2060 (1.27 percent), followed by the RTX 2080 (0.86 percent). AMD's highest entry is the Radeon RX 580 in eleventh, which is up 0.07 percent from the previous month.
There were few significant changes elsewhere, though Windows 10 continues to expand the gap between itself and Windows 7---no doubt a result of the latter's end-of-extended-support date now just four months away.