In brief: The latest Steam survey illustrates something we've known for a long time: the RTX 3060 is becoming increasingly popular among gamers. The mid-range Ampere card has moved into second place in the GPU chart and is now less than 1% away from catching the GTX 1650 leader.
June was an unusual month in the Steam survey's GPU chart. The top six positions all saw declines, though the RTX 3060's was the smallest, pushing it ahead of the second-place GTX 1060.
The RTX 3060 has been climbing up the Steam charts for a while now. The comparatively low price, availability on the second-hand market, and the fact it can match or even exceed its successor - which isn't having a very good time right now - in some games have made the previous-gen product an appealing prospect. Don't be surprised to see it top the Steam charts (again, but we don't talk about March) by the end of the year.
Most-popular GPUs in June's Steam survey
The best-performing card last month was the old GTX 1660 (up 1.87%), followed by the RTX 4060 laptop GPU - the RTX 4060 and 4060 Ti desktop cards remain absent, unsurprisingly. The AMD RX 6750 XT is a new entry in third, but sadly for team red, there's still no sign of the Radeon RX 7000 series in the main chart.
Another interesting section of the survey is operating system usage. Windows 11 might not be seeing global adoption rates at the kind of speeds Microsoft would like, but it's moving up the Steam chart as fast as Windows 10 is falling. The latest OS is now found in over 35% of participants' PCs, while Windows 10 has dropped to below 60%.
Last week brought news that Microsoft could be considering making Windows 11 a fully cloud-based subscription service. Expect to see its popularity drop if that ever happens.
Looking at the primary resolution category, 1920 x 1080 retained its massive lead (62%) despite a 2.33% decline. Second place 1440p, meanwhile, was up 0.35% to 13.23%. And in the Languages chart, leader English was down 1.42% as simplified Chinese rose 2.05%
Minus signs were the recurring theme across almost all of the category leaders. The only two that saw increases were total drive space, where 'Above 1TB' went up 1.48% to 51.16%, and Intel CPU speeds, in which 2.3 GHz to 2.69 GHz was up 1.4%.