They may still be hard to come by for most users, but Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 30 Series graphics cards continue to rise in use inside gaming PCs. In Steam’s latest hardware survey release, the numbers have risen across the board for every version of the Ampere-based graphics card.
The RTX 3070 leads for all of the newer cards at 1.59%, a .01% increase from July. The RTX 3060 made the biggest month-over-month leap in usage from 0.67% usage in July to 1.09% in August. For the higher-end RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 cards, their numbers dipped slightly. The RTX 3080 fell from 0.88% to 0.84% while the RTX 3090 went from 0.40% to 0.39%. For the Ti versions of the aforementioned cards, the RTX 3060 Ti jumped up to 0.57% from 0.44% usage. The RTX 3070 and RTX 3080 both debuted in August’s numbers at 0.23% and 0.16%, respectively.
Overall, the top 13 graphics cards are all on team green. The GTX 1060 leads the way with a 10.56% followed by the RTX 2060 at 6.87%. AMD doesn’t make an appearance until the AMD Radeon RX 580 shows up at just 1.53% of users. AMD’s latest RX 6000 series cards don’t appear in the top 80 of reported graphics cards.
What do the numbers show for the RTX 30 Series?
When you see numbers like 1.59%, it can be easy to scoff and look away. But when you think about the fact that Steam has over 23,000,000 users, you can get a better picture.
Even if just, say, half of that 23,000,000 takes the survey, that’s still 182,850 people with an RTX 3070 and a whopping 1.2 million people using a GTX 1060. On the other side of things, the most-powerful AMD card listed in the Top 80 — RX 5700 XT — has a user base of just 79,000 if we use half of the Steam users as the survey takers.
No matter which way you spin it, there are two big things to take away from all of this. The first thing to take away from the GPU numbers is that newer cards are still hard to come by. Unless you beat the bots or decide to pony up the dough to scalpers, you aren’t getting your hands on a newer GPU. That said, people are still finding ways to get the graphics cards into their machines, likely in the form of available prebuilts.
The second is that every mainstream gaming card from Nvidia continues to see a rise in usage among Steam users. It shows the faith that Nvidia users have in the products compared to the competition. When cards like the GTX 1060, GTX 1660 Super, and RTX 2070 continue to rise in usage, you know something right is happening.
With Intel set to enter the mainstream market soon enough, one thing is certainly clear: Nvidia remains king… for now.
