In a nutshell: The results of February's Steam survey are here. Last month was another good one for Nvidia's Lovelace cards; after the RTX 4090 became the first 4000-series to break into the main GPU chart in January, two more entries from the expensive lineup have joined the flagship: the RTX 4070 Ti and the RTX 4080. Yet again, however, the RTX 3060 and its laptop variant were the month's best performers by far.
The RTX 4090 made it into enough survey participants' machines in January to move into the main GPU chart, making it the first Ada Lovelace card to do so. Not surprisingly, it only took a few weeks for the RTX 4080 and RTX 4070 Ti to do the same thing. The former was the sixth top performer on the survey, found in 0.20% of machines, while the RTX 4070 Ti wasn't far behind: 8th position with a 0.18% share.
February's top-performing GPUs among Steam survey participants
The biggest user-share increases were once again found in the RTX 3000 series. The RTX 3060 topped the chart, followed by its laptop version in second and the Ti variant in fifth. The RTX 3070, 3050, and 3070 Ti also did well, highlighting the number of people opting for these cheaper and still powerful GPUs. One outlier is the RTX 2060 in third, likely due to many of these cards being available for low prices on auction sites.
The GTX 1650 remains the most popular GPU among Steam survey participants since it knocked the GTX 1060 off the top spot in November. There's still no sign of AMD's Radeon 7000 cards, though they launched later than Lovelace. Team red's best-performing card of the month was the AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT, which saw its user share grow by just 0.01%
Elsewhere, February was Intel's turn to make gains in the CPU section, albeit only fractionally (0.04%), giving it a 67.17% share compared to AMD's 32.8%.
Windows 11 keeps finding its way onto more Steam users' machines at the expense of Windows 10. The latest OS now has a 32.06% share after jumping 1.73% last month. This trend is repeating globally: Windows 11 reached its largest-ever global market share in January, hitting 18.1%. Windows 10, in contrast, has seen its share fall from 82.4% in December 2021 to 68.8% in the same month.
Little else has changed on the survey - will the Oculus Quest 2 ever be replaced as the top VR headset? - though it's interesting to see that while English is still the most popular language, it fell -1.60% as Simplified Chinese increased by 2.47%.