There's no doubt of NVIDIA's popularity among gamers and that can be seen on Steam's Hardware Survey where GeForce GPUs continue to secure the top spot as the most popular options with the latest statistics showing the RTX 3060 as the top choice.
NVIDIA GeForce GPU Market Share Continues To Rise Against AMD Radeon In Steam As RTX 3060 Becomes The Most Popular Graphics Card
As per the latest Steam Hardware Survey figures of March 2023, NVIDIA commands 82.63% of the share while AMD commands just 10.82% share amongst almost 135 Million users of which around 26-27 Million users were actively concurrently (at its peak). If you look at the more detailed figures, the vast majority of these GPUs are now DX12 compliant (94.47%), and full DX12 systems running a modern-day GPU now amount to 76.15% share.
This aligns with the operating systems used by the gamers as 73.95% of Steam's userbase is now running a Windows 10 64-bit while 22.41% are running Windows 11 64-bit. Considering that Steam has officially announced the end of support for Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 systems, they're now meant to go on a decline as users upgrade to the latest OS.
So coming back to GPUs, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 has now replaced the GTX 1650 as the most popular graphics card on the platform. This means that a vast majority of gamers are running this graphics card on their PC. A 10.67% share is also much higher than that of 1650 which had a 6.12% share by the end of February 2023.
The most important thing to note here is the pricing of the card which is also much higher than 1650. This shows that gamers are willing to pay for a higher-end and costly graphics card if it provides value and given just how many RTX 3060s were dumped into the used market and discounted after the crypto crash, this was to be expected. Over the years, we have seen the NVIDIA 70, 60, and 50-tier cards be the most popular solutions on the market. The GeForce GTX 970 was the last 70-series card to take the top spot and that was all the way back in 2016. Since then, cards such as the GTX 1060, RTX 2060, GTX 1650/1660, and now the RTX 3060 have been the most popular options.
Even higher-end cards such as the GeForce RTX 3070 and RTX 3080 show up in the top-10 list. None of AMD's modern-day GPUs show up in the Steam Hardware Survey but NVIDIA's RTX 4090 do show up though they are definitely not going to show up at the top any time soon as they are more recent releases and will take years (like the RTX 30 series) to make their way to the top spot.
Other interesting statistics show that Intel leads in terms of CPU usage compared to AMD. The blue team has a 74.46% share compared to AMD's 25.54%. If you look at the core-count distribution, the 6-core, 10-core, and 12-core CPUs are on the rise but 8-core CPUs have remained flat this month.
It is likely that 8-core chips don't offer as much value as they once used to but at the same time, chips such as the 5800X3D have been selling like hotcakes though that is but just one processor.
