Steam Hardware Survey for December 2017 reveals what the average gaming PC looks like

Steam has become the preferred online store for PC gamers over the years, and millions worldwide are enjoying their games on Steam these days.

Therefore, it’s logical that the Steam hardware survey results for each month of the year are followed closely by many, as this reveals the kind of machine those who game on PC are playing their games on these days.

It also acts as a sort of benchmark, letting you find out whether your PC is up to scratch or not, and whether it’s finally time to pony up for an upgrade too…

The results of the Steam hardware survey for December 2017 are now in, so let’s take a component by component look at what the typical Steam user’s gaming rig looks like.

Graphics Card

It should come as no surprise that the most popular graphics card found in Steam users’ PCs is a Nvidia model. After all, the US tech giant has a near monopoly of that market, and the most popular graphics card amongst Steam users is the GeForce GTX 1060 (14.6 % share).

Overall, more than 80% of Steam users are running a Nvidia card on their PCs, while rival AMD doesn’t even manage to reach a 10 % share, despite having launched their powerful Vega-based graphics card models last year.

Processor

When it comes to processors, few will be shocked to discover that Intel is the most popular brand amongst Steam users, with more than 90 % sporting one of these CPUs in their PCs. AMD comes in at a slightly below 9 % share, far behind Intel. Don’t feel sorry for AMD though, as their new Ryzen processors are reportedly selling pretty well, and the company is also gearing up to launch a new edition of their new processor line this year, while Intel is still struggling to get their Coffee Lake series to the market.

The Steam hardware survey also confirmed that quad-core processors are now standard (more than 70 % of Steam users are running a processor with four cores) and that use of dual-core processors is waning, as the survey shows less than a quarter of Steam users are still gaming on a PC with a dual-core CPU.

Monitor

While the Steam survey does not provide data about which specific brand of monitor people on Steam are using, at least we know for certain that high definition (1080p) has become the standard resolution for PC gaming nowadays, with more than 75 % of Steam players running their games at this resolution according to the survey.

Actually, only one resolution below can be considered quite popular (1366×768), with 8.45 % respondents to the survey saying they game at this resolution. Since this has been quite popular for laptop screens over the years, this might represent more casual gamers who play Steam games, rather than the hardcore crowd.

What’s clear too is that hardcore gamers are yet to migrate to ultra-high definition (2160p) monitors en masse yet, with less than 1 % of Steam gamers running their games at this resolution according to the December 2017 survey.

Memory

The time when 4 GB of memory was enough to run the latest video games has surely come to an end, and the latest Steam hardware survey surely is proof of this. Actually, almost half of the Steam users who took part in the survey report gaming on a PC with 8 GB of memory, while more than a third of respondents (37.5 %) had even more than this.

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