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Every so often, the monthly Steam Hardware Survey published by Valve shows some interesting swings. Nvidia GPUs and AMD CPUs are shown to be more popular versus their rivals, for example, then this is reversed the next month. Some theories suggest the swings are due to periods of intensive Steam use in territories like China, for instance, which has long national holidays, while others pin the change to differences in Valve's sampling methods.
In related news, the latest Steam Hardware Survey has been released for the month of October 2026, showing big swings in market share that reverse changes seen in the September survey.
Nvidia vs AMD GPU share, for instance, has seen AMD return to August's total of 18.7 percent after dropping two percentage points in September; Nvidia's share has likewise returned to its August total after a three percent gain.
It's a slightly different story for CPU share, where Intel has rebounded slightly compared to the September results, but AMD is still better off than it was beforehand - the full sequence is AMD holding a 46.5 percent share in August, a 48.4 percent share a month later and then back to 47.4 percent for the latest results.
Elsewhere, Windows 11 has gained 1.2 percent of the OS share, while macOS has gained by 0.4 percent and Linux by 0.9 percent; the corresponding drop is to Windows 10 at 2.5 percent. In terms of distros, CachyOS is now the most popular Linux distro used for Steam, at 0.65 percent, just ahead of SteamOS at 0.55 percent.
The other results make for interesting reading too. Looking at just the Windows respondents, there are shifts from 32GB to 16GB of system RAM, the RTX 3060 gains market share versus newer RTX 50-series GPUs - again likely to be a rebound versus the September results - and 1440p loses ground to 1080p.
The November results ought to restore normality, so stay tuned for those in about a month's time. If you find any more interesting stories in the data, do let me know!