Valve's Steam Survey: Windows 11 Still Leading, Windows 10 Holding Its Ground

Microsoft has been under massive scrutiny by Windows 11 users about how it has been handled by the company in the past few years. Complaints about broken updates and injecting AI features here and there across the OS have poured in from all parts of the world. Well, Microsoft has heard all the feedback and has assured to move away from its “AI Everywhere” strategy this year.

Windows 11 is still an undisputed leader on Steam

That said, according to the latest Steam Hardware & Software Survey, Windows 11 is still the most popular choice among Steam players (via Neowin). Windows 11 reportedly leads with 66.71%, thanks to better support for modern hardware and gaming features.

Surprisingly, Windows 10 is still holding its ground, as Valve’s survey hints that the OS is running on 27.79% of gaming PCs of Steam players as of February 2026. That’s a small increase from last month, but still a big thing given that the official support for the OS was killed three months back. Having said that, Windows 10 sits right below, in second place, after Windows 11 in Valve’s survey.

Speaking of other OS versions, Windows 7 barely hangs on with 0.08%. Overall, Windows dominates Steam with 94.62% of the platform’s users. Linux and macOS fill the remaining slice. Linux holds 3.38%, with Arch Linux the most common choice, while macOS has 2.01%, led by the 26 Tahoe version on Apple Silicon Macs.

NVIDIA remains the most popular GPU brand among Steam gamers

On the hardware side, gamers seem to favor 16GB of RAM (40.24%), six-core processors (28.45%), and the desktop NVIDIA RTX 4060 GPU (4.16%). NVIDIA remains the most popular GPU brand at 73.24%, while AMD takes 18.44%. CPUs, meanwhile, look more balanced, with Intel at 55.64% and AMD close behind at 44.36%. Most players still game at 1080p with 8GB of video memory.