Few things are more interesting than the surveys Steam publishes every quarter about the configurations their customers use. And this would be uninteresting in other circumstances, but being a survey with tens of millions of users, the sample size is tremendous.
September has been another month in which the RTX 3060 has proven to be the GPU with the best performance (1.4% more) among participants in the Steam survey.
The high prices of the RTX 4060 and 4060 Ti, combined with somewhat disappointing performance, along with the high availability of the RTX 3060 in the second-hand market, have pushed Nvidia’s card to take the top position.
That’s why the RTX 3060 leads the main GPU chart with a share of 6.27%, ahead of the previous number one, the GTX 1650, which is found in 4.78% of the participants’ machines.
The RTX 4000 series fails to convince gamers
The extremely expensive RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 failed to increase their performance, and the RTX 4060 was the best in the series with a tiny increase of 0.31%.
Meanwhile, AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 XTX continues to decline, dropping by just 0.2% and currently occupying the 73rd position.
Last month was not the first time the RTX 3060 claimed the top spot in the main GPU chart. It also happened in March, but that month saw a series of unusual changes; the RTX 3060 experienced a massive month-over-month increase of 6.2%, something nearly unheard of.
Valve never provided an explanation, and the survey results returned to normal in April, with the RTX 3060 dropping from the first position.
The most common features of PC gamers
In the rest of the survey, trends were reversed in several categories. Windows 11 has been narrowing the gap with Windows 10 for months, but the older operating system surged almost 2% to nearly 58% in September, while Windows 11 dropped by 1.79% to 37.4%.
Another shift in the status quo occurred in the CPU table. AMD has spent most of the year closing the gap with Intel, but the red team dropped by 2.24% in the latest count, while the blue team increased its market share to 68.77%. Intel could widen the gap further when Raptor Lake Refresh chips land in a few weeks.
Moreover, having six cores solidified as the most common result after a 2.74% increase. Most people have over 1 TB of free space on their hard drives, while the most typical amount of VRAM remained at 8 GB, which is becoming problematic for an increasing number of titles.
Lastly, English continues to be the most common language, but only by a margin of 0.11% after simplified Chinese rose by 5.34%.
