According to Valve's September 2026 Steam hardware survey, 32GB of RAM has surpassed 16GB to become the most common memory configuration among users. The share of 32GB systems reached 42.22%, an increase of 4.77 percentage points from August, while 16GB configurations dropped to 37.82%.
This shift is driven by the rising memory demands of modern AAA games, background applications, and local AI model processing. While 16GB was previously the standard for gaming PCs, 32GB is now increasingly viewed as the baseline for multitasking and high-performance workloads.
The survey also highlights broader hardware upgrades. Eight-core CPUs now account for 30.06% of the market. In the GPU segment, NVIDIA holds a 75.97% share, with the RTX 5070 becoming the most popular model at 5.86%. Meanwhile, 2K resolution monitors have grown to 27.04% of the user base.
Storage trends show that 53.30% of Steam users now have over 1TB of total disk space. Users with 4TB or more of storage increased by 4.06 percentage points to reach 7.28%. These figures reflect a general transition toward higher-performance hardware among the gaming community.
Valve notes that while these results indicate a clear trend, the survey reflects the specific Steam user base rather than the entire PC market. Monthly fluctuations can also be influenced by changes in the survey sample, though the transition from 16GB to 32GB as the new standard is considered significant.
