Nvidia’s RTX 3060 is still holding on to its ‘most popular GPU’ title and its closest contender is actually a laptop
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It’s now December, and with every new month comes a new Steam Hardware & Software Survey. We see this data as one of the best resources for understanding what kind of hardware PC gamers are using these days. Sure, not every single PC gamer uses Steam, but its popularity makes it almost synonymous.
Valve recently published its latest results from the survey, and we can see that the RTX 3060 just about remains on top. This last-gen graphics card has long delivered excellent value for money, so it’s unsurprising to see it relatively unshaken in terms of popularity.
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The RTX 4060 Laptop GPU is the second-most popular on Steam
You can check out the latest Steam Hardware & Software Survey for November 2024 on the site here. It covers aspects such as GPUs, display resolutions, language, and more. Let’s focus on GPUs specifically though. As has been the case for as long as we can remember, Nvidia remains the most popular, occupying the top 12 spots.
This does include a couple of laptop GPUs, namely the 4060 and 3060 – and it’s the former that is the closest competition for the RTX 3060, and it’s gaining. According to the latest stats, RTX 3060 usage has dropped slightly to 4.89%, while the RTX 4060 Laptop GPU has closed in with 4.76%. That’s followed by the desktop RTX 4060 with 3.70%.
Sometimes it’s easy to think that the the majority of PC gamers are playing on desktop, but gaming laptops certainly make up a strong percentage of users on Steam. The more budget-friendly models prove to be the most popular.
With the RTX 50 series just around the corner, we should start to see a shake-up to these Steam surveys in due time. Don’t expect the 50 series to take over, but a more affordable range of 40-series GPUs should skew the balance in its favor over time. AMD and Intel will also be launching new cards within a similar time frame, though we don’t exactly expect them to make a massive dent.
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