There's a new king of the GPUs in Steam's September hardware survey
The results of Steam's September hardware survey have been released. Though it's not the last word in what goes on in the PC gaming market, it provides an interesting glimpse into the hardware and software that gamers are using.
According to the September results, there's a new GPU king in town. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 is now the number one GPU among those surveyed. It relegates the previous number one card, the venerable GTX 1650 to second spot.
Month-on-month, the RTX 3060's share jumped 1.4%. That's the largest jump among all DirectX 10 and newer GPUs. That gives it a statistically very large 6.27% of the overall share. But why the jump? The obvious answer is that the price of RTX 3060's has dramatically fallen from its peaks during the years of extreme mining demand and covid related shortages. And, if you check out our review of the RTX 4060, you'll see it doesn't provide a big uplift in performance over the RTX 3060. The RTX 3060 12GB remains a viable option for gamers on a budget, and given the enduring popularity of cards like the GTX 1060 and RTX 2060, it could be a long time before it is usurped.
The rest of the GPU statistics are unsurprising. The RTX 4060 and RTX 4060 Ti will steadily increase in share over the following months (and years), while AMD's cards struggle to make any traction. The RX 580 is the most popular discrete Radeon GPU, and that's a six year old card. The only RX 7000-series card on the list is the RX 7900 XTX. The Radeon RX 7600 is not listed, though given its relatively low price, it'll surely end up more popular than AMD's most expensive card once it's included.
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