RTX 3060 Drops From First Place in Latest Steam Hardware Survey

One of Nvidia's Best graphics cards, the GeForce RTX 3060, has dropped from first place in the latest Steam Hardware Survey, falling to third place in just one month. Well, sort of. There was some very unusual data in last month's Steam Hardware Survey, which caused several Nvidia GPUs to spike extraordinarily high in adoption rates. Things have apparently been corrected, with the affected GPUs returning to normal.

The adoption rates, particularly for the RTX 3060 (desktop and laptop variants), GTX 1060, RTX 2060, and GTX 1650 changed drastically in Steam's Hardware Survey during the month of April (which reports on GPU market share in March). The RTX 3060 (desktop) sat at the top, replacing the GTX 1650 as the most popular GPU among Steam gamers and garnering a whopping 6.31% increase in "market share" in just a single month's time.

The second place position was also shaken up with the RTX 2060 replacing the GTX 1060, garnering an impressive (and highly unlikely) 3.42% uptick in popularity among Steam gamers, with the GTX 1060 falling to third place as a result. But the GTX 1060 also saw an unusually high 2.57% uptick in adoption rates as well. Filling out the rest of the top five GPUs in April were the RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 Ti, which both had outlier increases of 2.52% and 2.14%, respectively. Meanwhile, users with RTX 3060 Laptop GPUs saw a big drop to eighth place, where previously (before April) it was in third place.

This was all quite unusual, as the month-to-month GPU changes typically vary by less than 0.5% in the Steam Hardware Survey. Increases and decreases of several percent obviously indicated something went very wrong with Steam's data collection. With that issue fixed, we're greeted by similarly large changes in the opposite direction for May's results.

Steam Survey Results for May 2023

The Steam Hardware Survey for May (which looks at GPU market share for April) has reshuffled all the affected GPUs back to their normal hierarchy from before April. That means the GTX 1650 is once more in first place, with the GTX 1060 in second. There are a few other changes since we last reported on the Steam Hardware Survey in February.

The RTX 3060 desktop card now sits in third place, with the RTX 3060 Laptop GPU right below it, and the RTX 2060 takes the fifth spot. Before (in February), the RTX 3060 desktop card wasn't even in the top 5 list, with the RTX 3060 laptop GPU sitting in third place, RTX 2060 in fourth, and the GTX 1050 Ti in fifth.

However, those rankings can vary by GPU generation, as Steam lumps certain mobile and desktop GPUs together (e.g. GTX 1650 includes laptops and desktops), while newer models are broken apart (e.g. RTX 3060 and RTX 3060 Laptop GPU). Combining all results for a particular model number (so all RTX 3060 SKUs including desktop, mobile, non-Ti, and Ti parts), the RTX 3060 series is by far the most popular with a market share of 13.44%. Second place goes to the GTX 1650 series at 8.83%, then GTX 1660 series at 6.93%, GTX 2060 series at 6.34%, and RTX 3070 series at 6.12%.

In terms of generational popularity, the RTX graphics cards continue to hold a massive lead over the competition, with the 30-series coming in with 29% market share and the RTX 20-series with 11% market share. Unsurprisingly, RTX 40-series meanwhile sits at just 1.61% total, which itself is double last month's figure. AMD's various GPUs aren't doing nearly as well, with 2.97% among all RX 6000-series cards, 1.42% for all RX 5000-series parts, and 3.38% for the RX 500-series. All Vega-series GPUs (which includes integrated parts) account for 2.03%. AMD's latest RX 7000-series remains MIA, as far as the Steam Hardware Survey is concerned.

Here's the top 20 GPUs from the past month, according to Steam. We're using adjusted data from the API page, where we sum up the entire column of results and then divide each GPU by the total sum. That's because, for reasons unknown, the columns don't sum to 100% — April's total for DX12 systems is 91.53%, for example. We figure anything that isn't a DX12-capable GPU and thus isn't in the table... shouldn't count!

We've also broken down the totals by GPU family, though the Vega group includes both desktop Vega 64/Vega 56 cards as well as mobile Vega GPUs that are of an entirely different performance class.