AMD's Ryzen CPUs fight back in Steam's April hardware survey

AMD have been a bit on the back foot in recent years, but it would appear the release of their new Ryzen+ CPUs is already paying off. According to Steam's latest hardware survey for April 2018, AMD took a 4.8% bite out of Intel's lead last month, taking the number of Steam users using an AMD processor to a new high of 15.96%. That's an increase of 45% since December 2017.

Things aren't so rosy for AMD in the graphics card department, however, as Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1060 is still the reigning champion by quite some margin. 

The number of GTX 1060 users has actually been falling since January this year, but our best graphics card recommendation for 1440p gaming still makes up a sizable 12.29% of all Steam users' GPUs. The next most popular card is the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050Ti at 8.6%.

It would also appear that the steadily falling graphics card prices have encouraged a few people to take the plunge and upgrade, as there's been a 1.1% increase in the number of Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 users, and a 0.72% rise in Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 owners.

AMD's Vega GPUs and its RX 500 series, however, are still failing to make much of a dent, as the most popular AMD card on Steam's list is one of their old Radeon R7 models, taking a massive 0.96% of all Steam GPUs and coming 19th overall.

Indeed, it's not until you get significantly further down the list that the AMD Radeon RX 580 finally makes an appearance, taking a 0.29% share. That's a 1% increase month-on-month, but AMD's Vega 64 and Vega 56 cards don't even make the list.

Meanwhile, 1920x1080 is still the most popular resolution for single-screen setups among Steam users, making up 61.39%. That said, this is actually 10.62% lower than last month, with the biggest gain (4.24%) being at 1366x768.

On the multi-monitor side, it would appear that 3840x1080 (or two 1080p monitors) is still the favoured resolution, nudging up 0.03% to a total share of 34.89%.

April's hardware survey also introduces a number of fixes to address "the overcounting of cyber cafe customers" in Asia, according to Valve, which led to significant upheavals in OS and Language. "Many cyber cafes manage their hardware in a way that was causing their customers to be over counted," Valve said, prompting a huge increase in the number of Windows 7 users as well as the use of Simplified Chinese over the last seven months.

As a result, both stats fell dramatically in April's survey, with Windows 7 dropping by 20.9% and Simplified Chinese by 21.89%, allowing Windows 10 and English to take the top spot in their respective categories.