Intel and Nvidia Lead in Steam Hardware Survey
The latest Steam Hardware Survey data shows sustained market share for Intel CPUs and Nvidia GPUs among PC gamers. This data serves as a consistent benchmark for the consumer-grade performance expectations that Apple's M-series silicon competes against.
The January 2026 survey data shows Intel's CPU share at 56.64%, a slight 0.25% increase, marking its first gain after many months of decline. AMD's share, which had been steadily climbing, dipped slightly to 43.34%. This small gain for Intel comes after a significant long-term erosion of its dominance in the gaming market. Five years ago, Intel held an 81% share on Steam, but that has dwindled due to the popularity of AMD's Ryzen processors and stability issues that plagued Intel's 13th and 14th generation chips. On the GPU side, Nvidia's position remains commanding, with its graphics cards present in 73.24% of surveyed systems. AMD holds 18.44% of the GPU market, while Intel's integrated and discrete graphics account for 7.94%. Nvidia's latest RTX 50-series GPUs are seeing rapid adoption, with the RTX 5070 and 5060 quickly ascending the rankings of the most-used cards. The RTX 5070, released in March 2025, has already broken into the top five most popular GPUs on the platform, indicating strong demand for new AI-capable hardware. For Apple's engineering teams, these figures represent the real-world performance targets for M-series GPUs. Benchmarks in graphically demanding titles show that even recent Apple silicon, like the M5 Pro, delivers significantly lower frame rates than mid-range Nvidia cards from previous generations, such as the RTX 3060.
