Steam Hardware Survey Analysis September 2017 Reveals That Nvidia GPUs Are Dominating The Gaming Scene

This Steam hardware survey analysis will tell you about the different trends in the PC gaming world, which ones are on the rise and which ones are falling.

Steam hardware survey analysis gives us vital information regarding different hardware trends and here we are going to break them down for you. In this Steam hardware survey analysis, we will tell you all about the gaming standards as well as what is being used commonly by gamers.

We will also tell you which trend is on the rise and which ones are declining. The categories that we are going to look into are GPUs, CPUs, RAM, resolution, storage, VR headset and operating system.

First up let’s talk about the graphics cards. According to Steam, more gamers are using Nvidia graphics cards as compared to AMD. According to Steam, 70.3% of the users are using some form of Nvidia graphics while 17.1% are using AMD Graphics cards. 12.2% are using Intel integrated graphics.

DX12 GPU increased in popularity by 0.9% in September 2017. The most popular GPU is the Nvidia GTX 1060, which 7.7% users reported they were using. This percentage has increased by 1.1% in September. Although the GTX 1060 is available in 3 GB and 6 GB versions the most common amount of VRAM is still 2 GB.

The GTX 960 has 2 GB of RAM and also comes in as the second most popular GPU used with 6.8% users reporting using this graphics card.

Now we move on to the CPU part of the Steam hardware survey analysis. Keep in mind that the real market numbers are different and these are the numbers from Steam. This will not include PCs that are only used for work. According to to the Steam hardware survey, 83.4% of users use Intel CPUs.

AMD comes in at 16.5%. The most common clock speeds for CPUs were found to be 3.3 GHz to 3.69GHz, this is the frequency of relatively powerful quad-core CPUs which is no surprise as quad-core CPUs are the standard for gaming. Now that the Intel 8700K is out things might be different as it features 6 cores and 12 threads. According to the statistics, 57.9% of gamers use a quad-core CPU.

Moving on to the part of the Steam hardware survey analysis that covers RAM. 8 GB is the bare minimum that anyone in the gaming community is going to recommend. This is the standard and you should not use any less and will not need any more, in most cases. 44.4% of Steam users use 8 GB of RAM which is not surprising. 12 GB comes in at second place with 24.4% of the pie.

Moving on to the resolution part of the Steam hardware survey analysis, 1080p is still the most popular resolution to play games at and 56.7% of users reported that they play games at 1080p. This has increased by 2.5% in September. 1366×768 is the second most popular at 17.3%.

While many consider 1440p to be the sweet spot it in interesting to see that it only accounts for 2.6% of Steam users. 4K is also getting a lot of attention these days but the numbers reveal that only 0.79% of Steam users play games at 4K. Talking about storage, 44.8% users have 1 TB of storage and 25.2% of users reported that they have 100 GB to 249 GB of free space available.

Moving on to the VR headsets part of this Steam hardware survey analysis. It is important to note that the HTC Vive has 50.1% of the VR market and the Oculus Rift has 46.8%. These numbers may seem to be high but not many Steam users are using these headsets and they only account for 0.19% and 0.18% of the overall Steam users.

Let us know what you think about the Steam hardware survey analysis for September 2017.

Sarmad is our Senior Editor, and is also one of the more refined and cultured among us. He's 25, a finance major, and having the time of his life writing about videogames.