In a nutshell: The Steam Hardware and Software survey for July has landed. Last month was a good one for Nvidia's mid-range Lovelace cards, which made up four of the top five performers. And despite Intel's mounting problems, Team Blue still managed to increase its user share at AMD's expense. Windows 10, meanwhile, also saw gains as its successor's share fell.
The RTX 3060 remained the most popular GPU among Steam survey participants in July by a considerable margin, but one card that is quickly climbing the table is its Lovelace successor, the RTX 4060. It's now the fifth most popular card (the laptop variant is seventh) and was the top performer last month, increasing its user share by 0.45%.
Nvidia continues to dominate the chart. Its cards hold a total 76.92% share, while AMD has 15.17% and Intel has 7.57% - virtually all of Team Blue's GPUs are integrated graphics.
Half of the top ten best-performing GPUs last month were from Nvidia's current Lovelace generation, including two Super variants: the 4070 Super (fifth) and 4080 Super (tenth).
AMD's only 7000-series graphics card on the list, the RX 7900 XTX, saw its share decline 0.01% in July. The RDNA card is in the 93rd position in the main chart.
Away from GPUs, Intel had a bit of good news in the form of its CPU user share increasing 0.6% to 67.4% as AMD's declined by the same margin. The figure is a little surprising, given the massive problems we're seeing with the 13th- and 14th-gen Raptor Lake chips, but those could be reflected in next month's survey results.
The ongoing user-share battle between Windows 10 and Windows 11 swung in the former's way in July. The older OS climbed 0.74% as Windows 11 fell 0.82%. This means half of the survey's participants still use Windows 10.
Globally, Windows 10 has seen an increase in its user share over the last three months, yet it still has a 65% share compared to Windows 11's 30.8%, according to Statcounter.
Elsewhere on the Steam survey, 32GB of RAM keeps getting more popular (30.8%) as the amount of memory people have in their rigs. 16GB is still the leader (45.9%) despite declining slightly. As games and apps demand more RAM, expect this trend to continue.
8GB also remains the most common amount of VRAM found in participants' systems (35.4%), with 12GB in second place (18.3%). Games' demand for VRAM has been increasing for years, to the point where some titles even struggle with 12GB when all their bells and whistles are enabled.
Rounding up the survey, English remains slightly ahead of simplified Chinese as the most popular language, more than half of respondents game in HD (20% use 1440p), and most people have just 100GB to 249GB free storage space.