AMD closes in on Intel in latest Steam Hardware Survey — RAM capacity continues to rise despite the ongoing memory crunch
AMD is gaining on Intel, with user numbers jumping in the last month of 2025. Gamers are also quickly buying in 32GB of memory or more as the memory crisis is taking its hold.
(Image credit: Valve)
Valve has released the Steam Hardware Survey for December 2025, with the results showing AMD slowly creeping towards Intel’s supremacy in the gaming space. Team Red broke the 40% threshold in the third quarter of 2025, and in just a matter of four months, it gained an additional 7% over Intel (55.47% in the last survey of 2025) with the biggest jump happening in December, where AMD jumped by 4.66% to 47.27%. This happened despite the current memory shortage, with pricing for memory modules like DDR5 reached record highs.
AMD dropped support for DDR4 RAM with the introduction of the AM5 platform, so Ryzen 7000 and 9000 chips can only work with DDR5 memory. On the other hand, Intel’s Raptor Lake Refresh, which outperforms the newer Arrow Lake chips in gaming, support both DDR4 and DDR5. Nevertheless, it seems that gamers still prefer the older Zen 3 CPUs from AMD to deal with the memory shortage, with the Ryzen 5 5800X and 5800XT among the top selling processors on Amazon over the holiday period. Even AMD’s legacy 5800X3D, which you can no longer find new, is booming in the used market, with some examples already selling for more than a brand-new 9800X3D.
This goes to show how Team Red has upended the gaming market, especially as many gamers are enamored by the massive 3D V-cache found in X3D chips. Some of them also remember the horrors of Intel’s instability issue from 2024, which likely contributed to Team Blue’s fall from its 77% Steam Hardware share from just five years ago.
System RAM continues to grow despite challenges
Another surprise in the latest Steam survey is the amount of user-installed system memory continues to increase despite the on-going shortage. RAM prices have surged by more than 100% in recent months as AI’s insatiable demand for memory is biting into the consumer space. This has led to Micron shuttering Crucial, its consumer and enthusiast brand, to focus on HBM and customers.
