Nvidia RTX 3060 Begins its Reign as the Most Popular GPU
The latest Steam Hardware Survey (SHS) is out.As usual Offers Insight into the dynamics of PC hardware configurations favored by gamers. What caught our attention this month was the surge in usage of his Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060/3060 Mobile, one of the best graphics cards. In total, these 3060 category Ampere GPUs are the only double-digit percentage-ranked entries in the survey. Whether such a consolidation is “justified” is debatable, but the previous two generations of GeForce have not separated desktop and mobile GPUs as far as SHS is concerned.
Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1060 has become a legend in mainstream gaming. It’s competitively priced, offers significant generational performance gains, and can still be used for PC gaming fun today, so it’s entitled to success. It may be looking forward to the GTX 1060’s demise more than its rivals, as it continues to build modern PC games with features it doesn’t have (ray tracing, DLSS, etc.). upon.
It’s no surprise that the GeForce GTX 1060 remains the official top spot in the SHS GPU table with 7.24% (the DX12 PC gaming numbers from our research are used throughout this article). It has been profitable sporadically in the last few months. Presumably the card was sold by an upgrader and then used in a “new” entry level system.
Again, note that there is only one entry for “GTX 1060” in the chart. This brings together the 6GB and 3GB desktop variants of the GTX 1060, plus all laptop models. The 1060 was definitely a very popular card in its heyday, but not so much now.
Using data from Steam to merge the GeForce RTX 3060 and 3060 Mobile into one, we can see that the combined RTX 3060 entity outperformed the GTX 1060 between May and June of this year. In the latest September data, the RTX 3060 variants have a very clear lead with a total of 10.53% and are the only GPUs to score double digits in the table.
Separately, the GeForce RTX 3060 and 3060 laptop GPUs come in at #6 and #5 respectively. Even without the RTX 3060 “backing” it with its integrated numbers, it could easily be #1 and #2 on its own Steam in 2023 (sorry). Also note that the RTX launch window is not visible. 4070 or less. Nvidia’s price hike could mean that something like the RTX 4050 could end up being the best-selling Ada Lovelace generation GPU.
Elsewhere in the Steam survey, hexa-core CPUs have consolidated their lead very strongly in recent months. In terms of OS usage, Windows 11 continues to do well and will definitely break the 25% milestone by the time the next study is published.
Finally, there has been some controversy regarding VR headsets. Upload VR I got it Due to the “extreme” numbers for the Oculus Quest 2 (now Meta Quest 2) and “other” headsets, Valve had to step in and correct their VR headset market share information. Apparently, this segment may have false reporting due to hardware detection methods.
This is reason enough to question all Steam hardware findings. For a long time, we wondered whether Valve was using good statistical techniques (i.e. completely random sampling) instead of looking for other trends in hardware usage. Sadly, Valve never says exactly what they’re doing, but it remains the best published insight on PC hardware.