Nvidia's RTX 4090 Appears on Latest Steam Hardware Survey

The Nvidia RTX 4090 launched on October 12, 2022, laying claim to the performance throne and ranking as the most desirable (if not at all affordable) queen of the best graphics cards. The RTX 4080 and RTX 4070 Ti followed, on November 16 and January 5, respectively. The AMD RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT also launched on December 13, adding some Team Red competitors. But how many of the various cards have actually been sold? It's been difficult to get any clear indication, but the latest Steam Hardware Survey provides some intriguing insights.

We're looking at the API page and focusing specifically on the DirectX 12 GPUs, then scaling all of the percentages so that the totals for each month sum up to 100%. That reduces the cruft, so to speak — if you look at the Vulkan API list, in addition to showing about twice as many GPUs, note that the figures are all basically doubled. (Fun fact: The "NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080/4060/4050 Laptop GPU" all appear on the Vulkan list, though they're all at 0.00%.) Again, caveats are warranted. Here's our adjusted table:

There are presently 213 distinct GPUs being tracked, some desktop and some mobile. The most popular GPU, by the numbers, is Nvidia's GTX 1650, but it's worth noting that the GTX 1650 line includes both desktop and mobile 1650 chips, as well as GDDR5 and GDDR6 variants. If we perform similar grouping of data for some of the other GPUs, the RTX 3060 (laptops and desktops combined) accounts for nearly 9% of the total, making it the most popular chip overall.

But perhaps more interesting than the top-ranking GPUs, which rarely change positions, are the newcomers. It seems like Valve decided to add a bunch of new chips to the list this month, some of which aren't even out. The new GPUs include the RTX 4090 at 0.26% of the total, RTX 4080 at 0.15%, RTX 3090 Ti (finally!) at 0.14%, and RTX 4070 Ti at 0.05% — the GTX 1630 also appears at 0.02%, a fitting result for one of the most lackluster 'new' GPUs launched in the past year.

Based on the raw numbers, that means there are five times as many RTX 4090 cards "in the wild" as there are RTX 4070 Ti cards, and three times as many RTX 4080 cards. That's among Steam gamers, naturally, so an RTX 4090 used purely for professional work or AI training and inferencing wouldn't have the potential to show up. But consider also that the 4070 Ti only became available last month, so it's already doing pretty decent in terms of overall percentages.

Meanwhile, AMD's RX 7900 cards haven't shown up yet. Presumably, they're still lumped into the "Other" category, along with dozens of other chips. Or maybe not — who can say for certain, other than Valve? But all indicators suggest that Nvidia continues to sell far more top-tier GPUs than AMD. The RX 6900 XT for example is at 0.25% overall, while the competing RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 that also launched two years ago account for 2.08% and 0.60%, respectively. AMD's RX 6950 XT on the other hand sits at just 0.04%.

What do these percentages even mean in terms of total graphics cards sold? Not much. There are likely many GPUs from the past couple of years that have been used exclusively for mining purposes, or maybe even just professional work. Even among Steam users, though, we don't know if 0.26% means roughly that many of the more than 132 million Steam users have an RTX 4090, or maybe it's 0.26% of a much smaller subset.

Even if it's only 0.26% of the peak concurrent users, though, that's still a sizeable number — Steam regularly has around 30 million peak concurrents on any given day, according to the Steam charts. That would mean at least 78,000 RTX 4090 cards, and 45,000 RTX 4080 cards. Food for thought, at any rate.

Looking at the other charts, Nvidia still accounts for 75% of all GPUs, with AMD at 15.3%, Intel at 9.4%, and "other" (Imagination?) at 0.24%. The CPU data also still heavily favors Intel, but it's only by about 2-to-1 — AMD has made some serious strides in consumer CPU market share over the past five years.

There are of course the usual disclaimers about how Valve goes about collecting these statistics. The short answer: We don't know. The longer answer: We don't know, but there have been oddities in the past, and there are still concerns... but this is the best source of data that's readily available on the public.

Valve provides this data as a resource, but it's likely more to help game developers decide what hardware to target rather than to inform enthusiasts exactly how many of any particular GPU are in use. I'd still love to see RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT cards listed as separate items, but maybe they're currently less than 0.01% of sampled users. Maybe they'll get their own spots next month (don't hold your breath).