What just happened? Valve's latest Steam survey results have dropped. May was another month when the RTX 3060 outperformed every other graphics card to cement its position as the most popular GPU, while another Lovelace RTX 4000 product broke into the top ten. We also saw Windows 11 close the gap on its predecessor, Linux rise above a 2% user share, and 32GB of system RAM become increasingly popular.
The RTX 3060 leader had a bit of a blip in April when its user share declined 1.21%, but it was business as usual in May as the Ampere mid-range card experienced the largest monthly share increase (0.48%).
Five of the top six best-performing GPUs in May were xx60 or xx70 variants from Nvidia's current and previous generations. It's a similar picture looking at the most-popular chart, though one outlier was the GTX 1650, a former number one, which saw a 20% increase – not bad for a five-year-old product. We also see that the RTX 4060 has broken into the top ten.
Looking at AMD's latest cards, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX was the best performer with a 0.01% user share increase. It's also the most-popular RDNA 3 desktop card, sitting in 60th position on the main chart. Around 75% of the GPUs on this table are from Nvidia, almost 16% from AMD, and 7.6% from Intel (including integrated GPUs).
Elsewhere, Windows 11 continued to erode Windows 10's user share. The newer OS was up almost one percentage point last month to 46.08% as Windows 10 fell slightly to 50.35%. With this trend likely to continue as the older software nears its October 14, 2025, end-of-life date, expect Windows 11 to take the lead soon enough. It's a contrast to the global view, where Windows 11 continues to lag far behind its predecessor.
One interesting result is in the system memory category. 16GB remains the most popular (47%), but it keeps falling as more people opt for 32GB. New games are demanding more RAM all the time, which partly explains this increase, though 8GB is also on the rise, probably due to more ultrabooks and cheaper gaming laptops being sold.
Linux has also passed the 2% user-share mark for the first time in over a decade. The Steam Deck can take a lot of credit for this one.
As always, it's important to remember that the Steam survey is prone to occasional weirdness, and participation by users is optional, but it still gives a good overall view of the PC gaming landscape.