Visualisation of video card usage by manufacturer, with the largest expanse belonging to Nvidia
Visualisation of video card usage by manufacturer, with the largest expanse belonging to Nvidia.

The latest Steam Hardware Survey results are in for September, with Valve publishing updated stats on the hardware and software used by computers are connected to the Steam network. The big news this month? Intel's CPU share versus AMD has dropped by almost two full percentage points, one of the largest swings we've seen in recent memory, while Nvidia GPUs have seen a nearly three percent climb against AMD and Intel competition. Elsewhere, octa-core CPUs are becoming increasingly commonplace, likely as gamers are turning to mid-range and high-end X3D AMD Ryzen models.

The AMD versus Intel CPU battle has been going on for decades, but it looks like AMD is closer than ever to reaching the 50 percent crossover point - with 48.4 percent of people on AMD silicon and 51.6 percent on Intel alternatives. That's a 1.9 percent shift from Intel to AMD compared to last month's results, and suggests that the March 2027 crossover point that we predicted back in June might have been too conservative an estimate!

In video card land, Big Green has moved from 72.9 percent to 76 percent, a 3.1 percent improvement, with two-thirds of those coming from AMD and the remaining third from Intel. No new cards have been released recently, but Nvidia cards have become a hot commodity for AI usage and more in the minds of gamers too - so perhaps that goes some way to explaining the shift. The single fastest-growing Nvidia GPU? For Windows PCs, that's the RTX 5070, which now accounts for 6.2 percent of all systems that took the survey; the closest competitors are the RTX 5060 Ti at 4.1 percent and RTX 5060 at 4.4 percent.

Finally, CPU core counts continue to climb, with octa-core CPUs now exceeding 30 percent of all respondents across Windows, Linux and macOS. That's after a two percent rise, with 10-core, 14-core and 18-core systems also rising in representation. Ancient quad-core systems saw the biggest drops, at -1.7 percent.

There's plenty more to glean from the data, so why not give it a go yourself by checking out the full Steam Hardware Survey results? Just remember to come back here and report your findings!