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Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 drops 6 percent in new Steam survey

The last-gen mid-range Nvidia GeForce GPU is hugely popular but saw a massive dip in the April 2023 Steam survey, while AMD Radeon continues to struggle.

Steam survey

The latest Steam survey results are in and the seemingly big news is that the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 has plummeted from top spot on the list with a user percentage rating of 10.67 percent to just 4.66 percent. That still puts it in third spot overall but it’s a sharp climb down from the previous month’s results.

There is a good reason for this drop, though, which is that last month’s results were seemingly rather error-strewn, or at least there had been some change in the way the results were collated. That month the RTX 3060 had leapt up from just 4.36 percent the previous month, much to everyone’s surprise.

Steam hardware survey results 2

Source: Steampowered.com

This sudden change corresponded with a huge leap in the number of Steam users registering as using simplified Chinese as their Steam language, suggesting that perhaps LANs or other mass-use computer facilities in that country had skewed the result.

Sure enough, this month Chinese has dropped back down by 26.60 percent, putting English back at the top of the list, with Russian, Spanish and Portuguese (Brazil), rounding out the top five.

Steam survey graphics card usage

As for the rest of the most used graphics card top five, we see a return to the top for the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 with 6.19 percent of Steam gamers using that card. It’s a card that isn’t actually quite as old as you might think, having come out in 2020, though still supports the notion that ‘most’ gamers use modest hardware.

In second spot with 4.99 percent is the venerable Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060, which dates all the way back to 2016. Rounding out the top five is the RTX 3060 with 4.66 percent, the RTX 3060 laptop variant with 4.51 percent, and the RTX 2060 with 4.45 percent.

Steam hardware survey graphics card usage

The most popular current-generation card is surprisingly the most expensive of the lot, the $2,000 Nvidia RTX 4090, which sits in 50th spot with just 0.43 percent usage. Meanwhile, the first AMD graphics card on the list is shown as simply ‘AMD Radeon Graphics’, which is presumably a mobile or integrated variant, while it’s the six-year-old AMD RX 580 that is the first desktop card with 1.11 percent usage.

The company’s latest 7000 series cards don’t even make it on the list while the AMD Radeon RX 6600 is the most popular AMD GPU from last generation, with 0.49 percent, followed closely by the AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT.

Steam survey CPU usage

As for CPU usage, Intel still tops the charts with 67.14 percent usage compared to 32.84 percent for AMD CPUs. Sadly, Valve doesn’t provide further details on which specific processors Steam gamers are using.

Steam hardware survey CPU core usage

The survey does, though, show that six-core CPUs remain the most popular with Steam users. However, we see there has again been a month-on-month change with March 2023’s results showing a big jump in six-core processors, up to 46.59 percent, only for this to drop back down in the April results, to 34.38 percent.

The next most popular is eight-core with 18.99 percent then we drop all the way down to just two cores with 8.46 percent and round out the top five with 12-core chips with 3.96 percent. Only 0.12 percent of Steam gamers still use a single-core CPU.

Did you spot last month’s strange results or are you an RTX 3060 owner? Let us know your thoughts and questions on this post by joining the conversation on the Custom PC Facebook page, via Twitter, or join our Custom PC and Gaming Setup Facebook group and tap into the knowledge of our 375,000+ members. Click here for more Valve news.