The latest Steam Hardware Survey (SHS) is out, and as usual it provides insight into the dynamics of the PC hardware configurations favored by gamers. What caught our eye this month was the impressive surge in Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 / 3060 Mobile usage, one of the best graphics cards. Added together, these 3060 category Ampere GPUs become the only double digit percentage ranked entry in the survey. It's arguable whether such a merge is ‘justified’ or not, but the previous two GeForce generations don’t separate out the desktop and mobile GPUs as far as the SHS is concerned.
Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1060 has become something of a legend for mainstream gaming. It has every right to its success, as it was priced competitively, provided a great gen-to-gen performance uplift, and can still be used for PC gaming fun today. Ironically, Team Green might be looking forward to the demise of the GTX 1060 more than its rivals, as it continues to frame modern PC gaming in terms of features that aren’t supported by ye olde Pascal architecture — ray tracing, DLSS, and so on.
It's no surprise the GeForce GTX 1060 is still holding onto the official top spot in the SHS GPU tables with 7.24% (DX12 PC gaming figures derived from the survey will be used throughout this article). It's even made sporadic gains over the last few months — perhaps cards have been sold by upgraders and are being subsequently enjoyed in ‘new’ entry level systems.
Again, bear in mind that there's only a single entry for "GTX 1060" in the charts. That aggregates GTX 1060 6GB and 3GB desktop variants, plus any laptop models as well. There's no question that the 1060 was a very popular card back in its heyday, though it's less so now.
| Position | DX12 GPU Systems | MAY | JUN | JUL | AUG | SEP | %CHG |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 | 7.46% | 7.28% | 7.41% | 6.89% | 7.24% | 0.35% |
| 2 | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 | 7.02% | 7.21% | 6.81% | 6.89% | 6.92% | 0.03% |
| 3 | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 | 5.44% | 5.39% | 5.42% | 5.40% | 5.55% | 0.15% |
| 4 | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti | 5.95% | 5.74% | 5.96% | 5.34% | 5.22% | -0.11% |
| 5 | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop GPU | 2.93% | 3.32% | 3.59% | 3.75% | 4.40% | 0.65% |
| 6 | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 | 2.56% | 2.88% | 2.77% | 3.54% | 3.83% | 0.28% |
| 7 | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti | 3.05% | 2.93% | 3.00% | 2.81% | 2.82% | 0.00% |
| 8 | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER | 2.69% | 2.65% | 2.65% | 2.70% | 2.74% | 0.04% |
| 9 | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 | 3.05% | 3.04% | 2.99% | 2.78% | 2.63% | -0.15% |
| 10 | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 | 2.33% | 2.23% | 2.46% | 2.56% | 2.56% | 0.00% |
| 11 | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti | 1.85% | 1.89% | 2.03% | 2.20% | 2.31% | 0.11% |
| 12 | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 | 2.59% | 2.32% | 2.57% | 2.21% | 2.14% | -0.07% |
| 13 | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 | 1.27% | 1.49% | 1.48% | 1.79% | 2.13% | 0.34% |
| 14 | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 | 1.86% | 1.90% | 1.86% | 1.82% | 2.05% | 0.23% |
| 15 | AMD Radeon Graphics | 1.56% | 1.78% | 1.42% | 1.86% | 1.91% | 0.05% |
| 16 | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 | 1.65% | 1.60% | 1.81% | 1.88% | 1.86% | -0.02% |
| 17 | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER | 2.17% | 1.93% | 2.13% | 1.96% | 1.84% | -0.12% |
| 18 | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Ti | 1.53% | 1.51% | 1.40% | 1.40% | 1.39% | -0.01% |
| 19 | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 | 1.50% | 1.42% | 1.51% | 1.43% | 1.36% | -0.06% |
| 20 | AMD Radeon RX 580 | 1.62% | 1.47% | 1.58% | 1.42% | 1.31% | -0.11% |
| 21 | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 | 1.57% | 1.42% | 1.56% | 1.40% | 1.30% | -0.10% |
| 22 | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER | 1.29% | 1.20% | 1.27% | 1.22% | 1.22% | 0.00% |
| 23 | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti | 0.97% | 1.00% | 1.14% | 1.20% | 1.21% | 0.01% |
| 24 | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Laptop GPU | 0.73% | 0.81% | 0.79% | 0.97% | 1.07% | 0.09% |
| 25 | AMD Radeon RX 570 | 1.29% | 1.18% | 1.29% | 1.14% | 1.04% | -0.10% |
| 26 | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER | 1.09% | 1.03% | 1.05% | 1.00% | 1.02% | 0.03% |
| 27 | AMD Radeon Vega 8 Graphics | 1.10% | 1.14% | 0.99% | 1.12% | 1.01% | -0.11% |
| 28 | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU | 0.80% | 0.84% | 0.91% | 0.89% | 0.93% | 0.05% |
| 29 | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 | 1.13% | 1.02% | 1.12% | 0.96% | 0.88% | -0.08% |
| 30 | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop GPU | 0.57% | 0.64% | 0.61% | 0.70% | 0.87% | 0.17% |
If we merge the GeForce RTX 3060 and 3060 Mobile into one, using Steam's data, it turns out the unified RTX 3060 entity eclipsed the GTX 1060 between May and June of this year. In the newest September data, the RTX 3060 products are very clearly in the lead with a total of 10.53%, the only GPU to make double digits in the table.
Even as separate line items, the GeForce RTX 3060 and 3060 Laptop GPUs are 6th and 5th, respectively. If we didn’t ‘help’ the RTX 3060 with the merged figures, they could still easily make it to first and second position on their own steam (sorry) sometime in 2023. Also note that there's no launch window in sight for the RTX 4070 or below. Nvidia’s increased pricing might mean something like the RTX 4050 could end up as the best selling Ada Lovelace generation GPU.
Elsewhere in the Steam survey, hexacore CPUs have very firmly cemented their lead over recent months. In OS usage, Windows 11 continues to look strong and will certainly break the 25% milestone before the next survey is published.
Lastly, there has been some VR headset controversy. Upload VR noted that Valve has had to step in and correct the VR headset market share information, as it had some ‘extreme’ figures for the Oculus Quest 2 (now Meta Quest 2) and ‘Other’ headsets. Apparently, there might be some misreporting in this segment due to the hardware detection method.
And that is reason enough to question all Steam hardware survey results. We've long wondered whether Valve uses proper statistical methods (ie, fully random sampling), rather than looking for other trends in hardware use. Sadly, Valve never says precisely what it's doing, though it remains the best publicly available insight into PC hardware.
