What just happened? Are graphics card buyers being more frugal in these times of economic uncertainty? The latest Steam survey suggests so, with most of last month's best-performing cards comprising mid- to-low-end GPUs and those from previous generations.

Despite holding the top spot for almost five years, the GTX 1060 was last month's second-best-performing card. The number of survey participants sporting the Pascal card in their rigs jumped 0.34%---only the RTX 3060 Laptop GPU did better with a 0.61% increase.

Last month's top ten biggest GPU gains show a familiar pattern: the list is made up of older cards like the GTX 1660 and RTX 2060, as well as mid/low-range options like the RTX 3060 and RTX 3050 Ti.

The highest-positioned (non-laptop) top-end card is the RTX 3070 Ti, up just 0.02% last month. Interestingly, the RTX 3080 Ti, Radeon RX 6900 XT, and Radeon RX 6800 XT made no gains, while the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 were down -0.01%, despite the recent price drops among premium graphics cards.

There's little significant change in the main GPU chart. The RTX 3060 and 3060 Laptop cards are the highest Ampere entries in fifth and sixth place, respectively.

Elsewhere in the survey, September marked the second month in a row that AMD lost CPU share to Intel. Team Red was down -0.82% to 31.24%, moving Intel closer to the 70% user share it previously enjoyed. It'll be interesting to see how things change once Raptor Lake and Zen 4 start affecting the figures

We also see that Windows 11 is now running on almost a quarter of all participants' PCs---it was the only Microsoft OS to increase last month---8GB is the most popular amount of VRAM, and 1080p remains the most common resolution (66.38%), though 1440p was up 0.33% to 11.25%.

Finally, September was another month in which the Oculus Quest 2 VR headset lost user share. It was down -7.86% to 41.39%, which is still a lot higher than the second-place Valve Index HMD (17.21%).