What just happened? The latest Steam survey has arrived with a big change: a graphics card has knocked the GTX 1060 off the top spot for the first time since January 2018. November was also an excellent period for AMD CPUs, which reversed a months-long trend of declines to grab an almost 4% user share back from Intel.
The most popular graphics card among Steam survey participants had been the GTX 1060 since it replaced the GTX 750 almost five years ago. But the Pascal card has now been replaced by a Turing entry, though it's not the RTX 2060 as some might have expected---that card lost users last month---it's the budget GTX 1650 that first arrived in 2019.
November was another month that showed signs of conservative consumer spending. Barring a couple of exceptions, the top-performing GPUs (below) were all on the cheaper end of the scale. The GTX 1650 was second with a 0.66% increase, while the RTX 3050, GTX 1050/Ti, GTX 1650 Ti, and GTX 1660 Ti all made significant gains. The AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT, which was recently on sale for $99, also did well.
Not for the first time, the RTX 3060 Laptop GPU was the month's top performer, but the desktop version lost -2.06% of its user share; November wasn't a good month for the more expensive desktop cards.
Moving onto CPUs, AMD finally saw its fortunes turn around after four straight months of losing users to Intel. Team red snatched a 3.88% share from Chipzilla, moving it back above the 30% overall milestone---could the Zen 4 powered Ryzen 7000 series finally be starting to sell well after its slow start, possibly thanks to the recent reductions?
Elsewhere in the survey, Windows 11 returned to its usual state of regularly increasing users following an uncharacteristic decline in October. Microsoft's newest OS was up 4.61% in November as Windows 10 fell -3.31%, pushing the former closer to the 30% overall mark. And while it has been hanging on for a while now, Windows 7's share fell to just 1.88% overall.