Steam‘s latest Hardware and Software Survey for July shows a major shift in the PC gaming market. The results reveal that 8-core processors and graphics cards with 16 GB of VRAM have now become the most common hardware choices among Steam users.
According to data collected by Valve (thanks VideoCardz), systems with 8-core processors now account for 27.85% of users, moving ahead of 6-core CPUs, which have dropped to 27.52%. This change reflects the growing demand for processors that can better handle multitasking. Eight-core chips can manage more threads than 6-core models, and many modern games are now able to make better use of more than six physical cores.
A similar change has happened in the graphics card market. Systems with 16 GB of VRAM increased by 1.40 percentage points, reaching 25.90% of Steam users. This pushed them ahead of 8 GB VRAM graphics cards, which now stand at 25.32%.
Steam Survey Shows 8-Core CPUs and 16 GB VRAM GPUs Are Now the Most Common
These figures include all Steam users across Windows, macOS, and Linux. When looking only at Windows users, however, 6-core CPUs (28.43%) and 8 GB VRAM graphics cards (33.20%) still remain the most common. This is largely because of the large number of gaming laptops and mid-range graphics cards running Windows.
Windows 11 also continues to grow, reaching 75.01% of Steam users on Microsoft’s operating system.
In the graphics card rankings, the GeForce RTX 3060 is still the most popular model with 3.88% of users. However, NVIDIA’s RTX 50 series is quickly gaining ground. The GeForce RTX 5070 is now in second place with 3.72% after increasing by 0.33 percentage points over the last month. Other newer models, including the RTX 5060 Ti (2.40%) and the desktop RTX 5060 (3.03%), are also becoming more common.
These results show that the standard gaming PC continues to improve as more players move to hardware with higher core counts and larger amounts of graphics memory.
