It’s the beginning of December, which means the November 2021 Steam hardware survey is fresh out the oven from Valve HQ. However, this month’s data may cause some upset at Intel, as its Alder Lake processors don’t appear to have made a dent in the continued growth of AMD Ryzen CPUs in gaming PCs.
As we reported in September’s Steam hardware survey, AMD is on something of a winning streak with its market share, which now sits at a steadily growing 31.53% (+0.69%). There are several likely contributing factors for the slow adoption rate, such as Alder Lake’s new LGA 1700 socket, which can only be found on new Z690 motherboards, and bumps up the price of adoption by a significant margin.
While benchmarks suggest that Intel’s 12th generation processors are capable of trading blows with AMD’s best gaming CPUs, buyers may believe that Intel still needs to prove it’ll keep up this competition moving forward, rather than continue to rest on its laurels with lukewarm products like its recent 11th generation Rocket Lake chips.
Given that the ongoing chip shortage has impacted peoples’ ability to purchase the best graphics cards, it’s no wonder that the best gaming laptops have seen an increase in popularity. The Nvidia RTX 3060 ‘Laptop GPU’ grew to 1.75% (+0.39%) and is now the most popular RTX 3000 video card on Steam, with the desktop Nvidia GTX 3070 just 0.01% behind it.
Windows 11 has now overtaken Windows 7 to become the second most popular OS on Steam, with its share now standing at 8.28% (+6.46%). In terms of the best VR headsets, Steam users continue to show their preference to jump into virtual space with the Oculus Quest 2 with a 36.32% (+1.30%) share.