Latest Steam Hardware Survey shows gains for AMD

The latest Steam Hardware Survey has been released and it's a good time to be AMD with the company making steady gains over the last few months. 

In September, AMD achieved the 25 percent share milestone when it comes to what processor Steam users have. That's a gain of 0.84 percent over the previous month with an improvement of over 3 percent since May. It's a steady increase for the company that's sure to encourage them even further. 

We're speculating that much of this is thanks to AMD's Zen 3 processors doing an impressive job of improving single-threaded performance in recent times compared to Intel, while also being reasonably well priced a lot of the time. 

It seems like that trend will continue with the imminent announcement of all things Zen 3 later this week. It's expected that we'll see new high-end Ryzen 5000 series processors announced with possible Ryzen 9 5900X benchmarks showing up earlier this week as well as news of Ryzen 7 5800X benchmarks last week.

The Steam Hardware Survey has also highlighted steady gains for all graphics cards of a GeForce flavour. The GeForce RTX 1060 remains the GPU of choice with the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti just behind it. 

Perhaps most interestingly of all, there's been a nearly 2 percent increase in the use of the Oculus Rift S VR headset. We're guessing that's due to a number of factors. Half-Life: Alyx launched back in March and gamers may have finally invested in VR by now, but the prospect of VR-based Microsoft Flight Simulator in the near future will also potentially help here. Plus, there's also Star Wars: Squadrons for those wanting a more fictional based flight experience. VR hasn't seen the growth that some developers may have hoped for, especially as Half-Life: Alyx was considered potentially a killer app, but steady growth is steady growth, even if it's smaller than hoped. 

As always, the Steam Hardware Survey remains an interesting way of seeing how trends are changing over time, and what gamers are seeking out with their upgrades.