Windows 11 reaches a new high adoption rate on Steam and AMD CPUs are gaining a lot of traction too

Steam published the hardware and software survey for December and things are going in the right direction for Windows 11. It’s adoption rate among gamers rose to almost 55%, 1.98% up from the latest report. I don’t believe that the recent Microsoft incentive to gamers is responsible for this growth, but the fact that Windows 10 will reach end of support this year might have a lot more to do with this upshift.

Of course, Windows 11’s popularity growth means that Windows 10 dropped by 0.92 points to 42.39% and Windows 7 also dropped to 0.15%. The latter will soon reach a solid 0 as Steam doesn’t work on Windows 7 anymore.

Surprisingly, the Windows 11 adoption rate on Steam gamers is even higher than in the previous months even though the 24H2 version of the OS was constantly riddled with problems and the Auto HDR bug certainly did some damage among gamers. If you didn’t know, Microsoft stopped the 24H2 update for PCs that have the Auto HDR on because the feature causes several problems on many games and it may even causes them to freeze.

Another interesting development is that AMD CPU adoption rose with a hefty 4.96%. That is certainly due to the uprising popularity of their Zen 5 chips that feature the 3D V-Cache game-changing feature. Even so, Intel CPUs still dominate with 63.43% over 38.73 for AMD in Steam gamers’ adoption preferences.

Although it’s a natural move, we also need to mention that gamers on Steam are also slowly upgrading their RAM from 16 GB and 32GB to 64GB. The PC configurations with 64GB rose with 0.59% in December to 3.49% while 16GB RAM systems took a slight fall to 45.07%, down by 0.86% from the previous month.

In another unsubscribing change, gamers are dropping the 6GB GPUs with 2.42% drop in December. The gain went mostly to 16 GB GPUs which rose with 0.88%. Still, the majority of gamers (70%) seem to be using GPU cards with 8GB or less VRAM.

As a conclusion, gamers on Steam are inevitably adopting Windows 11 and they are updating their PCs with stronger configurations, due to the new AAA games such as STALKER 2 that require insane amount of resources.

Are you planning an upgrade to play the latest games? Let’s talk about that in the comments below.