It’s important not to lose sight of the diversity of hardware. Sure, we’d all love to be playing with the latest and greatest, but a typical price tag for, say, one of Nvidia’s RTX 5090 GPUs makes that anything but realistic. A glance at the monthly Steam hardware survey demonstrates you can get on just fine with hardware that’s a few years old.
However, if you’re looking for anything deeper than a thousand-foot view of the state of hardware, Steam has offered one more reason to take its findings with a pinch of salt. For instance, the latest Steam Client Beta patch notes reveal a now fixed issue “where VRAM on some graphics cards was not reported correctly” to the survey.
As for system RAM—a particularly interesting data point given the still raging memory supply crisis—40.24% of participating PCs reported 16 GB. This is apparently a less than 1% drop from the end of last year—whether that represents deep-pocketed folks upgrading, or others selling off some of their RAM sticks is unclear. Either way, Nick’s testing from earlier this month demonstrates that 16 GB of RAM is still plenty to play with.
Another interesting point to highlight is the teeny tiny 0.11% gain for Windows 11, which now possesses a 66.71% slice of the operating system pie. Windows 10 died something of a death in October, but a significant 27.79% chunk of machines are still holding on to the sunset operating system.
Given the share of the pie it held just a few months ago, that’s not really the massive new year decrease one might’ve expected. While I’d advise against holding on to an old operating system—especially if you’re not getting the free security updates only available to residents of the European Economic Area—holding on to older hardware for the foreseeable future is likely still the way to go.
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