December Steam Survey: the Nvidia RTX 3060 leads Ampere's rise

[midian182]

In a nutshell: December's Steam hardware & software survey has landed, giving us an idea of what PC components participants received over the holidays. The previous month was a good one for Nvidia's last-gen Ampere line, especially the RTX 3060, which is quickly moving up the most-popular-GPU chart.

November's Steam survey revealed that a new graphics card topped the GPU chart for the first time since 2018. The GTX 1650 remained number one in December despite a slight (-0.06%) decline, but it might soon be feeling pressure from a much newer and more powerful card: the RTX 3060.

The most popular GPUs among Steam survey participants

The RTX 3060 saw the biggest gains last month, jumping up +0.47%. It was followed in second place by its Ti variant (+0.31%).

It appears that Ampere was on a lot of participants' Christmas wishlists: the RTX 3070 was the third best-performer with a +0.28% increase, its Ti version was ninth (+0.08%), and the RTX 3080 was thirteenth (+0.07%).

The best-performing GPUs among Steam survey participants in Demcember

The RTX 4000 series has yet to appear on the chart, unsurprisingly, given its price and lower-than-expected sales. The Radeon RX 7900 series, which admittedly only arrived in the middle of December, is also absent. It'll be interesting to see if the RX 7900 XTX's potentially faulty vapor chamber affects its popularity.

In the CPU category, AMD's long-running trend of gaining and then losing share continued with a -0.71% decline, putting its total share at 32.16%. A recent Mindfactory report showed team red sold more CPUs than Intel last month—in Germany, at least—so the company is unlikely to be concerned by Steam's latest figures.

Elsewhere, Windows 11 continues to erode Windows 10's share after the former gained +0.44% more users, taking its total share to 28.42%. And after clinging on for years despite official (not paid-for) support ending, Windows 7 kept sliding toward obscurity on gaming machines with a -0.22% decline, dropping its share to just 1.66%.

The rest of the category leaders remain unchanged: the Oculus Quest 2 is still the most popular VR headset by far, most people use a 1920 x 1080 resolution and have 8GB of RAM (despite an increasing number of games asking for more), and a third of participants have six physical CPU cores.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/97143-december-steam-survey-nvidia-rtx-3060-leads-ampere.html

 

[Theinsanegamer]

I wish steam would change to asking all users to poll once a month, and show a percentage of how many agreed to said poll. Would give much more accurate numbers.

It's also interesting how the RX 6000 series numbers are so low despite being out of stock for nearly as long as nvidia, 0.20% for the 6900 xt and 6800xt, the 6700 and 6600 not much better, which I think reinforces the idea and the rumors from retailers that during the heat of the GPU craze AMD could not get those cards out in reasonable numbers.

 

[Puiu]

I wish steam would change to asking all users to poll once a month, and show a percentage of how many agreed to said poll. Would give much more accurate numbers.

It's also interesting how the RX 6000 series numbers are so low despite being out of stock for nearly as long as nvidia, 0.20% for the 6900 xt and 6800xt, the 6700 and 6600 not much better, which I think reinforces the idea and the rumors from retailers that during the heat of the GPU craze AMD could not get those cards out in reasonable numbers.

While popular with the DIY crowd, AMD is still very much missing from pre-built PCs.

 

[punctualturn]

I wish steam would change to asking all users to poll once a month, and show a percentage of how many agreed to said poll. Would give much more accurate numbers.

It's also interesting how the RX 6000 series numbers are so low despite being out of stock for nearly as long as nvidia, 0.20% for the 6900 xt and 6800xt, the 6700 and 6600 not much better, which I think reinforces the idea and the rumors from retailers that during the heat of the GPU craze AMD could not get those cards out in reasonable numbers.

Exactly why I dont bother in following the survey.

This has been going on for over a decade now, but every month is the same thing:

1- post the incorrect numbers.
2- nvidia owners congratulate each other (specially the ones that depends on nvidia kickbacks).
3- AMD and sane gamers together ask "Where the hell did all the 6K GPUS went?"
4- and the bickering continues until the next survey.
5- Restart.

Anyways, this is a waste of time.

 

[lripplinger]

Interesting results. So the GTX 1650 edged out the venerable GTX 1060 for most used graphics card. I still use the GTX 1060 6GB myself.

 

[HardReset]

DirectX 12 GPUs: -0.42%
DirectX 8 GPUs and below: +0.36%

Trash sells quite well...

Remember that Radeon 9000 series supported DirectX 9 with SM 2.0. Those came out 2002. That's 20 years ago!

 

[NintPlayBox]

Microsoft truly have a winner with Windows 11!