Nearly half of Steam gamers upgraded to Windows 10

Valve updates its Steam Hardware Survey at the first day of every new month and it's always nice to take a look at the changing landscape of the PC market.

One of the interesting things about the latest report is that it learns us that Windows 10 now has a marketshare of 48.95 percent. Market penetration among Steam gamers will likely reach the 50 percent mark by next month. Windows 7 remains the second-most used operating system, it still has a marketshare of 34.66 percent, followed by Windows 8 at 10.26 percent. Windows XP on the other hand is almost gone, just 1.56 percent of Steam gamers are still using this ancient version of Windows.

Running an older version of Windows will be increasingly discouraged by Microsoft, especially because new hardware platforms like Intel's Kaby Lake and AMD's Zen will not receive official support for Windows 7/8.1.

For the full data you can check out the link below, but I'll cover a couple of highlights. In the processor market, gamers are still flocking to Intel. The chip giant now powers 77.4 percent of PCs owned by Steam gamers, up from 77.3 percent the month before. Then there's also the GPU market, 57.57 percent of Steam gamers now have an NVIDIA GPU, versus just 24.44 for AMD. The arrival of Polaris didn't stop AMD's plunge, the company's marketshare actually decreased from a level of 24.7 percent the month before.