Steam conducts its hardware and software survey every single month, which gives us an excellent idea of what gamers are most commonly using. In the September 2024 hardware survey, the RTX 4060 laptop GPU was nearing the RTX 3060, with the most used resolution being 1920 x 1080. Despite all the rage about the 4090 or 4K OLED gaming monitors, budget-friendly options are always going to be the most popular.
That being said, with the December 2024 Steam hardware survey, it turns out that the RTX 4060 laptop GPU has lost its momentum, which was threatening the RTX 3060’s top spot.
MSI Gaming RTX 3060
GPU
GA106
VRAM
12 GB
Bandwidth
360.0 GB/s
Memory bus width
192-bit
Base Clock Speed
1320 MHz
Boost Clock Speed
1777 MHz
CUDA cores
3584
Steam December 2024 hardware survey breakdown
Despite being over three years old, the RTX 3060 is still massively popular. It is the best-selling GPU on Amazon US, with over 9,000 units sold last month. So, it isn’t surprising to see it at the top of the GPU section. The 5.88% of all users have an RTX 3060 in their build has increased by 0.99%, while the RTX 4060 laptop GPU only gained more audience by 0.14%. It’s entirely possible that the 12GB 3060 simply feels like better value for money than the 8GB 4060, especially with VRAM being a hot topic as of late.
On top of that, the most favored resolution, with 56.12% of all users gaming using it, is still 1920 x 1080p, which makes sense if the RTX 3060 is the most used GPU as it is best for powering 1080p or 1440p gaming at best. 1440p came close with 19.56% and only 4.21% for 4K, with a 0% gain.
So, the RTX 3060 is going strong, even gaining more traction and finishing 2024 strong. However, with the release of the Nvidia 5000 series and AMD 9000 GPUs around the corner, we’ll see how well the 3060 holds up. AMD is targeting the budget and mid-range GPU market segment. There is also the Intel Arc B580, which has better performance than the RTX 4060, RX 7600 XT, and even the RTX 4060 Ti in some cases during our in-house testing.
