Even though Nvidia’s x90 cards garner the majority of media attention, the company’s high-volume GPUs have consistently been the x60 series over the years. This also applied to Ampere, since the RTX 3060 was frequently cited as the top 1080p GPU for Nvidia PC gamers who desired to maximize their settings. However, the cheaper Turing-era GPUs have long outperformed the 3060 on Steam. After dominating the leaderboard for some time, the $150 GTX 1650 has finally been overthrown as of October. The RTX 3060 has officially surpassed all other GPUs to earn the top rank on Steam.
Over the weekend, Valve’s survey bots worked hard to generate the most recent results of the well-known hardware poll. After more than 2.5 years on the market, the RTX 3060 has made a significant ascent to the top of the GPU ladder. The rankings are as of the end of September. In the Steam Survey, it’s a changing of the guard as the Ampere successors to the Turing and Pascal cards take center stage. The RTX 3060, which increased by 1.37% to capture the top spot on the leaderboard, made the largest overall change last month; the other rising cards only saw a slight improvement in their rankings. With 6.10% of the Steam pie, the RTX 3060 is at the top of the chart.
We’re willing to bet that gamers looked at the RTX 4060, said, “nah,” and decided to just purchase an RTX 3060, if we were to speculate as to why the RTX 3060 standings suddenly shot up. After all, the 12GB model is now a great price when compared to the 8GB RTX 4060, and it’s still great for 1080p gaming. Although using an Ampere card prevents you from taking use of DLSS 3 frame generation, most games do not yet support this technology. It’s also not necessary for older games or eSports. Additionally, thousands of games will be able to generate frames starting in 2019 thanks to AMD’s Fluid Motion Frames.
All things considered, AMD GPUs are still completely absent from the Steam poll; the first red team GPU to show is integrated Radeon graphics, ranked 12th. The most widely used AMD add-in card is the RX 580, which came out in the 2017 Polaris era. This $229 GPU was designed for 1080p gaming, and the RX 7800 and 7700 XT GPUs that were just released do not appear to be available either. With barely 0.22% of the market, the flagship RX 7900 XTX is still buried at the bottom of the rankings, while the 7900 XT, its younger brother, hasn’t even made an appearance on the chart since it was introduced about a year ago.