November was certainly quite a busy month. Not only for the release of Intel’s new Alder Lake-S processors but also the formal launch of the Windows 11 operating system. With this in mind, therefore, it was always going to be interesting to see what the initial reaction from the PC gaming community was going to be. And following the release of the latest Steam Hardware Survey, we certainly have some very interesting answers!
Steam Hardware Survey
Starting off with processors, despite the launch of the Alder Lake-S platform, AMD has still managed to gain itself a fairly healthy portion of extra market space over the last month. Now, with a 0.69% rise, this admittedly isn’t huge, at the same time though, it’s still a step in the right direction that sees Team Red further cement that golden 30% figure (currently 31.53%). Why hasn’t Intel made more of an impact here though? Well, we suspect it boils down to two key points. Firstly, AMD CPUs are still (generally speaking) quite easy to get hold of, and secondly, they’re a hell of a lot cheaper than the adoption process for Alder Lake-S.
Graphics cards pretty much remain the same. Nvidia still (as you probably expected) dominates the vast majority of the list. Albeit, as seen last month, there are still only 2 mentions of any 30XX GPUs in the entire top 50. Another sign that supply levels continue to remain awful (not that you really needed one). All going well though, unless something very dramatic happens, with the 1060 currently top of the list, if it can retain this spot for one more month, it’ll have held the #1 positive (as the most commonly owned gaming graphics card) for exactly 3 years. A pretty firm indication as to just how popular the 1060 was and still remains today!
Windows 11
What about Windows 11 though? Well, the short answer is that for its first official month on the market, it has done a lot better than many would’ve expected. Making its debut on the list with an 8.28% market share (incorporating around 1.8% of those who were already on the preview version), this is certainly a good start for the new operating system. Particularly since this gain has been almost entirely eaten away from Windows 10.
Let’s be honest though, the figures need at least another 11 months for us to really understand just how well Windows 11 has done. And call me crazy, but in a best-case scenario, I doubt that the market share will be greater than 10 even by that point. People can be amazingly loyal to their operating systems.
Where Can I Learn More?
With a lot of big tech releases literally just on the horizon, we expect to see a lot of things change very quickly on the Steam Hardware Survey over the coming months. – If you do, however, want to delve into the details, you can check out the official website via the link here!
What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!
