According to the latest Steam survey, AMD now accounts for 30% of CPUs in gaming PCs. This is the healthiest market share AMD has enjoyed in a long, long time, and not necessarily surprising news, except that it took a long time to get to this point.

AMD's Zen 3 chips were released in late 2020, and chips like the Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 5 5600X have made a significant impact on our guide to the best CPUs for gaming. However, both of these chips suffered from supply issues and were essentially sold out by the beginning of the year. Inventory is starting to return, however, and the number of machines with these chips appears to be on the rise.

Unfortunately, the way the Steam Hardware Survey actually collates CPU data means that it is not the most useful information you will see. The survey stores the number of cores and operating frequency separately, making it almost impossible to actually track down the model. So while we can see a trend in the number of CPU cores in a machine, we see the biggest increases in 8-core chips.

For graphics cards, however, the situation is a bit clearer, as we can see which models people are actually buying. The biggest rise here is the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 in laptops, with Nvidia's other Ampere GPUs also making steady inroads.

Interestingly, the mobile GeForce GTX 1060 suffered the biggest down tick, which indicates that there are plenty of gamers upgrading from the previous generation, which makes sense given Ampere's performance gains compared to Pascal. This makes sense, given Ampere's improved performance compared to Pascal.

As is typical with any Steam survey, there are a lot of interesting numbers. More about overall trends than specific numbers.