Windows 11 has finally tipped the scales of the Steam hardware survey, with 51.9 percent of users now running the latest version of Microsoft’s operating system.

The Steam hardware survey consists of all the people who use Steam to game, and it automatically measures the hardware its customers use to game on. So beyond Windows 11 gaining market share here, we can also see Windows 10 losing market share as more gamers upgrade.  The survey also mentions that most gamers use the RTX 3060 to game on, and most players still use 1080p monitors.

That being said, this only consists of people who use Steam to game. While the platform is easily the most popular PC gaming arena, other statistics from early April suggest that Windows 11’s overall market share is closer to 26.7 percent which means that Windows 10 is still around 70 percent.

Windows 11 has been available for three years, but at launch, gamers expressed displeasure with the system. When benchmarking games, users found that they would get slightly lower frame rates compared to Windows 10. However, a lot of that has been ironed over since then, and as someone who’s been using Windows 11 since the beginning, I think the visual upgrades to the operating system and how much more modern it feels make it worth upgrading to.

Microsoft plans to retire Windows 10 on October 14, 2025, so people on the older OS will have just under a year to use it before it stops receiving updates. The system will still work past that date, and Microsoft will offer a year of security updates past then, but it will become less secure over time as Microsoft stops giving it attention.

If you want to install Windows 11, most PCs can, and the update is free if you’re coming from Windows 10. It’s likely that this update will stay free as Microsoft continues to push more people to upgrade to its latest OS, but just in case, I recommend that you upgrade before October 14th, 2025.

Source: Steam Via: Digital Trends