Once a month, PC gaming mega-giant Valve opens a request for additional hardware and software for Steam users to gauge trends and ultimately focus on the world’s most common components. Most of them are predictable and follow obvious patterns, such as the average amount of memory (RAM) increasing over time and the parts that have stopped falling off the graphs.
Still, some news offers insight into buying habits and product acceptance. Especially Steam Hardware & Software Survey for April 2026 It shows that NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3060 with 8GB of VRAM remains the most common discrete graphics card this year. For context, this GPU is now three and a half years old, and many gamers are already arguing The viability of 8GB cards in 2026.
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Linux and macOS changed to very slight negatives, but the values were less than 1 percentage point and should not be considered alarming. At least Valve reports Arch Linux as its most used “distro”, which is the basis for its internals. SteamOS A competitor to Windows 11, pre-installed its four-year-old Steam Deck handheld and the upcoming Steam Machine PC.
Windows Central’s take: Inaccessibility is forcing a new norm for PC gamers
Again, it’s natural for Steam’s survey to reflect incremental hardware and software upgrades, but seeing a quarter of users keep Windows 10 is telling. while Activists around the world are organizing mock funerals for Microsoft’s operating systemprobably a lot of PC gamers don’t want to stick around until the bitter end, maybe theirs wear and tear resulting from device incompatibility.
That and seeing the RTX 3060 clinging on for dear life helps justify my frustration with the lack of optimization in modern AAA games. It’s not the 12GB version that’s still going strong on my wife’s computer; it’s the entry-level 8GB model in NVIDIA’s RTX 30 Series no native FP8 support for advanced DLSS technology. Your average gaming rig is two generations old.
PC gamers seem unwilling to budge until the bitter end.
And against Microsoft’s assurance that 32GB of RAM is “don’t worry”. In the world of ridiculously expensive DDR5 memory, there’s still no significant change from 16GB as the most common number in Valve’s latest survey. All this keeps my hopes up The Steam Engine comes at “affordable” prices.
That and I’m checking on friends and relatives who are suddenly stuck on Windows 10. We can always pass TPM 2.0 verification and upgrade an unsupported PC to Windows 11 with a little extra work, but still starting to feel the strain for those who refuse to move at all. There is you still using Windows 10? What are your plans for October? It didn’t take long.
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