The outcomes of Steam’s September {hardware} survey have been launched. Although it isn’t the final phrase in what goes on within the PC gaming market, it offers an attention-grabbing glimpse into the {hardware} and software program that avid gamers are utilizing.
In keeping with the September outcomes, there is a new GPU king on the town. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 is now the primary GPU amongst these surveyed. It relegates the earlier primary card, the venerable GTX 1650 to second spot.
Month-on-month, the RTX 3060’s share jumped 1.4%. That is the biggest soar amongst all DirectX 10 and newer GPUs. That offers it a statistically very massive 6.27% of the general share. However why the soar? The apparent reply is that the worth of RTX 3060’s has dramatically fallen from its peaks in the course of the years of utmost mining demand and covid associated shortages. And, in the event you take a look at our evaluate of the RTX 4060, you may see it does not present a giant uplift in efficiency over the RTX 3060. The RTX 3060 12GB stays a viable possibility for avid gamers on a finances, and given the enduring reputation of playing cards just like the GTX 1060 and RTX 2060, it could possibly be a very long time earlier than it’s usurped.
The remainder of the GPU statistics are unsurprising. The RTX 4060 and RTX 4060 Ti will steadily improve in share over the next months (and years), whereas AMD’s playing cards battle to make any traction. The RX 580 is the most well-liked discrete Radeon GPU, and that is a six yr previous card. The one RX 7000-series card on the checklist is the RX 7900 XTX. The Radeon RX 7600 isn’t listed, although given its comparatively low worth, it will certainly find yourself extra in style than AMD’s costliest card as soon as it is included.
During the last a number of months, I have been anticipating Home windows 11 to take a bigger market share. It has not. The truth is, in September, it truly misplaced some share to Home windows 10. That is a little bit puzzling. So long as Home windows 10 continues to get safety and replace help from Microsoft, avid gamers appear to be content material with it, or not less than see no compelling motive to change to Home windows 11.
On the CPU facet of issues, probably the most notable change is the rise within the variety of programs with 6-core CPUs. They make up almost 36% of programs. 4-core programs proceed to drop in quantity. The variety of 8-core CPUs fell a little bit bit. That is doubtless because of the e-core counts of Intel twelfth and thirteenth Gen CPUs, because the variety of programs with 10,12 and 16-cores all elevated.
Intel continues to dominate the market, with Intel CPUs being discovered in additional than twice as many programs as these with an AMD CPU.
Apparently, the quantity of storage in gaming programs continues to extend. Greater than 55% of the programs surveyed got here with greater than 1TB of drive area. With 1TB SSD costs plummeting in latest months, including a second or third drive is cheaper than ever. And with video games requiring ever extra disk area, that is a pattern that is solely going to proceed. Valve wants so as to add 2TB and above 4TB classes.
Once more, the Steam {Hardware} Survey isn’t a scientifically correct survey, however with 100 million or extra customers, it does give us a glimpse into what’s being utilized by avid gamers at a cut-off date.
The TL;DR is that Nvidia GPUs stay far and away extra in style than AMD’s challengers, avid gamers are content material to carry onto GPUs for a few years, the core depend and storage quantity of gaming programs is growing, and Home windows 11 may be very a lot ‘meh’.