December 2023 in Steam emphasized the trends of the past 2023 and did not bring surprises. Users are gradually switching to younger NVIDIA RTX video cards of the last two generations – RTX 3060, RTX 4060 and others. At the same time, choose 8 GB, 12 GB or more integrated memory for better performance of games. The importance of multitasking in games is growing, as is the desire of gamers to have more processor cores. But users do not want to switch to Windows 11.
Video cards
The most popular video card remains the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060, which in December was used by 5.13% (+0.24%) of players. Former perennial leader GTX 1060 slips to third place with 3.76% (-0.44%), behind GTX 1650 with 4.54%. The era of both recent graphics cards is coming to an end, with the 1650 being phased out, and new generations of AMD and Intel processors this year offering integrated graphics comparable to the GTX 1060.
The share of other inexpensive RTX 3000 and 4000 video cards has increased significantly:
- RTX 3070 – 3.23% (+0.11%, 7th place)
- RTX 4070 – 1.53% (+0.33%)
- RTX 4060 Ti – 1.06% (+0.21%)
- RTX 4060 – 1.04% (+0.23%)
Surprisingly, the RTX 3060 and RTX 4060 notebooks lost almost half a percent each – -0.44% and -0.37%, respectively. It is difficult to explain this with an almost unchanged share of integrated video cards, but perhaps the mysterious RDPDD Chained DD with an increase to 0.74% (+0.59%) is involved.
Users want not only more modern video cards, but also enough built-in memory:
- 8 GB – 31.67% (+0.44%)
- 12 GB – 15.23% (+0.92%)
- 16 GB – 1.67% (+0.12%)
- Other – 0.97% (+0.46%)
The last category is interesting because it consists mainly of configurations with more than 24 GB of RAM – all the smaller popular sizes are listed separately. In addition to RAM, the amount of permanent memory in players’ computers is increasing: more than 1 TB – 52.75% (+0.76%).
Processors
The number of PC chips with 6 cores increased by 32.11% (+0.23%). There are not so many processors with a large number of cores, but mostly their number is also increasing: 10 cores – 4.07% (+0.18%), 12 cores – 5.15% (+0.08%), 16 cores – 2.97 % (+0.08%), 20 cores – 0.17% (+0.06%). The decrease in the percentage of 8-core processors (20.43% -0.12%) and 14-core (3.35% -0.26%) can be explained by the change in the nomenclature of specific models on the market.
Operating System
At the beginning of 2024, Steam stopped supporting Windows 7 and 8. But the total share of users of these OSes on the service was 0.89%, so you should not worry about it. But the latest Windows 11 does not grow. Formally, its percentage even fell to 41.95% (-0.09%), but the insignificant percentage is explained by the peculiarities of the calculation. Windows 10 holds the lead with 53.45% (-0.08%).
In 2023, Steam released a record number of games – more than 14,500.
