GTX 1650 still reigns supreme
The Steam hardware survey is a chance for both Valve and the general public to see exactly what PC gamers are playing at that particular time. It can reveal some pretty interesting results. For example, in the latest survey, it looks like Nvidia and AMD’s new generation of graphical hardware are barely getting a look in.
You can check out June’s results over on Steam (via PC Gamer). The GPU section in particular is intriguing, showing that over 90% of gamers are using DirectX 12 hardware. However, if you were curious to see where Nvidia’s RTX 4000 series or AMD’s RX 7000 cards are, you’d think no one was buying any of them.
The most used video card, representing 5.67% of Steam users, is the GTX 1650, a GPU that’s three years old at this point. The first instance of an RTX 4000 series is the laptop version of the 4060 at the 29th spot, with the 4070 Ti even further down. As for AMD’s RDNA 3 technology, well that doesn’t show up on the list at all. In fact, the first instance of Team Red is at the 14th position, with 2.01% of gamers utilizing just “Radeon Graphics”.
Price alone could be a factor
It’s a pretty good indication of where gamers stand when it comes to new hardware. While a few RTX 3000 cards are on the survey (with the 3060 being second), the fact that just a tiny percentage are using new-gen Nvidia cards is pretty telling. Gamers know just how expensive new equipment is, so it’s perhaps not too surprising that just a fraction of people on Steam have an RTX 4000 card.
Both AMD and Nvidia launched new GPUs in 2022, beginning the next era of graphics hardware (Intel also launched itself into the graphics card world, but we don’t talk about that). After more than two years of uncertainty, thanks to global tech shortages brought on largely by the pandemic, many were starting to see hardware become available again. However, if this Steam survey is anything to go by, plenty of people are happy to stick with older graphics cards for now.
