Nvidia's RTX 3070 Out-Sold Every Other GPU in March of 2021

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We live in strange times.

RTX 3070
(Image credit: Nvidia)

Despite the massive graphics card shortage taking place right now, Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3070 has somehow made it up the ranks in Steam's hardware survey and racked in an additional 0.17% of market share in under a month. Which makes Nvidia's RTX 3070 seemingly the most popular graphics card purchased in March of 2021, period.

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3070 debuted on October 29th of last year and quickly became one of the best graphics cards of 2020 and this year (if you can get one at a reasonable price). The RTX 3070 comes with 5888 CUDA cores, 8GB of VRAM, and a 220W TDP as well as featuring Nvidia's newer technologies like DLSS and RTX support.

Steam GPU Hardware Survey

(Image credit: Steam)

We have no idea what caused the massive spike in adoption for the RTX 3070, especially amidst a graphics card shortage. This data only comes from Steam's hardware survey, so take it with some salt as we can't verify this data with other hardware survey programs.

Either way, this is very unusual behavior from a higher-end graphics card like the Ampere-based RTX 3070. Traditionally, graphics card popularity is significantly higher with both Nvidia and AMD's budget-oriented cards, like the GTX 1060, 1050 Ti, GTX 1650, RX 570, and RX 580.

Granted, the RTX 3070 is still only in 17th place, and not a very popular card overall, however, the fact that Nvidia's new mid-range card managed to outsell every other graphics card on the market last month says how strange the graphics card market is right now.

So if you're on the hunt for a graphics card, be sure to check out the RTX 3070, as it seems Nvidia is making a "lot" of these cards.

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Aaron Klotz
Aaron Klotz
Contributing Writer

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

5 Comments Comment from the forums
  • magbarn
    It's easy to explain when it's the least desirable Ampere card for mining due to poor price/performance ratio. Therefore improving its chances to actually being used by a gamer.
    Reply
  • bigdragon
    Seems like the 3070 is priced too high for miners. They'd rather buy the 3080 or a 3060 Ti. The price jump to the 3080 is not that much more, and the mining performance drop to the 3060 Ti is insignificant. The 3070 seems well suited for gaming, and EVGA has been selling them at fair prices.

    I got tired of stock errors, address errors, weight errors, and other checkout issues across all the online stores. If a vendor wants to hook me up with a 3070, we should talk. Otherwise, I'll wait for the 40-series. The most recent Blender versions improved sculpting so much that the need to upgrade from my 1070 is gone.
    Reply
  • cryoburner
    We have no idea what caused the massive spike in adoption for the RTX 3070, especially amidst a graphics card shortage. This data only comes from Steam's hardware survey, so take it with some salt as we can't verify this data with other hardware survey programs...

    ...So if you're on the hunt for a graphics card, be sure to check out the RTX 3070, as it seems Nvidia is making a "lot" of these cards.
    Nvidia uses the same product names for their laptop parts now, including the low-power Max-Q configurations. So a lot of these may be laptop 3070s getting grouped in with the desktop cards, rather than a case of Nvidia producing lots of desktop cards. There are undoubtedly prebuilt systems getting included in there too, from large manufacturers that may have had pre-existing deals for a large number of cards.

    Considering graphics cards in general are hard to find in stores and online, and the going rate for 3070s from resellers on sites like eBay tends to be upward of $1300 currently, it's questionable whether anywhere near that many people are buying them on their own for gaming right now.
    Reply
  • Jim90
    Probably best not to waste time on these utterly ridiculous, meaningless news pieces until cards actually become available to purchase. Both Nvidia and AMD's own websites, for example, have reported "Out of stock" for many months. Kindly touch base with your readers a little more!
    Reply
  • sizzling
    It doesn’t really tell us anything. In the current situation the gpu with the most sales will be the one they managed to get the highest volume on the shelves/virtual shelves. I would expect the 3070 has the best profit margin of the GDDR6 (non X) cards so would not be surprised if they are targeting production on it.
    Reply