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The latest Steam Hardware Survey results are out and they show that the most popular graphics card used on Steam right now is the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060. This continues a long-running trend of Nvidia’s 60-series gaming GPUs taking the top spot on the chart, with the RTX 3060 and GTX 1060 both holding the title previously.
While the Steam Hardware Survey isn’t the absolute last word on the popularity of all GPUs, the sheer number of gamers on the service – just last week it passed the milestone of 40 million active Steam players – means it’s a great indicator of the wider PC gaming community. As such, it’s safe to say this Nvidia GPU is indeed very widely used, even if the RTX 4060 can’t claim to be the very best graphics card available right now.
Valve releases the Steam Hardware Survey at the end of each month (via this link), with it showing the most popular gaming GPUs used to play games on the service, along with the most popular CPUs by brand, clock speed, and number of CPU cores. The operating system gamers use to access Steam, along with the number of VR headsets, number of Mac users, and whether gamers are using a DirectX 10, 11, or 12 GPU are also tracked. You can see the full range of tracked features in the images below – right click or hold down your finger on them to view in full size.
Over the years, one of the most enduringly popular GPUs on the platform has been the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060. Notably, the direct successor to the GTX 1060, the RTX 2060 (the first mid-range card of the ray tracing-enabled RTX era) never actually took the top spot as, along with the rest of the RTX 2000 series, it was relatively underwhelming when it came to overall performance.
Instead, it was the RTX 3000 series that really started to pull gamers away from the GTX era. The RTX 3060 took the top spot on the Steam Hardware Survey back in October 2023, finally displacing the GTX 1060. Now, another 18 months later and it’s the RTX 4060 that has finally unseated the RTX 3060.
Not only has the RTX 4060 taken that spot, but the extent to which it now dominates the charts is surprising. It has jumped 3.97% in the last month to now account for 8.57% of all GPUs used by Steam users (who participated in the optional survey). The next most popular GPU is the RTX 3060 with 6.87%, while we’ve seen significant jumps for some other RTX 4000 series cards too.
The RTX 4070 rose 2.54% to now be fourth on the chart with 5.43% of the total GPU usage. The RTX 4070 Super also jumped 1.6%, although the laptop RTX 4060 actually dropped by 0.91%.
As for how AMD and Intel are faring on this chart, it’s not great news. Only one AMD GPU saw any rise in usage, with the rather old AMD Radeon RX 6750 GRE rising 0.1%. Meanwhile, no individual Intel Arc GPUs make it onto the list at all. Interestingly, AMD also saw a negative result in the CPU charts this month, with its chips dropping 5.12% while Intel CPU usage rose 5.14%.
As you might expect given all the recent talk of RTX 5090 stock and even RTX 5070 Ti stock being so hard to obtain, none of Nvidia’s newest RTX 5000 series cards make it onto the Steam Hardware Survey this month, but we wouldn’t be surprised to see one or more of these cards sneak onto the bottom of the chart over the next few months. Although, with AMD’s just-announced RX 9070 XT price, maybe we could finally see AMD make some positive progress on the chart in the near future.
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