RTX 3060 cements its place as the most popular GPU on Steam as NVIDIA remains dominant over AMD

NVIDIA's RTX 3060 is busy cementing its lead as the most popular graphics card with Steam gamers.

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The RTX 3060 is going great guns, and has been since late on in 2023 (Image Credit: GIGABYTE)

If you follow the Steam hardware survey, you'll likely be acquainted with the dominance of the RTX 3060 in the GPU department of late, as the NVIDIA board has been at the top of the rankings since October 2023 (when it dethroned the GTX 1650, in fact).

The RTX 3060 has been up and down a little in its percentages since then. The GPU rose to a mighty 6.27% last October, then dropped back down towards the 5% mark - still remaining in place as the top graphics card, mind - before grabbing a 6.17% share of Steam gamers in February.

Now with the freshly released March figures from Valve (highlighted by VideoCardz), we can see the RTX 3060 has never been more popular, with the GPU reaching 6.92%.

Why the sudden uptick in popularity? Well, we have to take Valve's hardware report with a fair bit of seasoning, as changes in the PCs being surveyed can affect the outcome.

Still, it seems clear enough that the RTX 3060 is becoming increasingly dominant, possibly because it's pricing has become more attractive of late - you can nab the 8GB model for not much more than $250 in the US now (that's on Newegg).

RTX 4060 gaining ground

Interestingly, the RTX 4060 is also making progress in terms of climbing the rankings for GPUs used by Steam gamers. The successor to the RTX 3060 is now in eighth position, sitting in the gaming PCs of 2.59% of Valve's survey respondents, which is up a healthy 0.6% on February 2024.

In fact, the RTX 4060 was on just 1.07% in December 2023, so in only a few months, this graphics card has leapt ahead and more than doubled its user base.

Again, we have seen some price drops with the RTX 4060, and on Newegg you can pick up an MSI Ventus model for $285 (using a discount code), which is not much more than the cheapest RTX 3060 as noted above. (The RTX 4060 was very recently at $279, as you may have seen).

Indeed, given the price difference of $35 here, the RTX 4060 is definitely a more worthy buy (at least at the time of writing - and bear in mind that US pricing does not reflect the wider PC gaming market that Valve's survey encompasses).

It's no surprise to see that NVIDIA still dominates for GPUs with Steam's stats, and Team Green's graphics cards hold the top 15 positions.

The first AMD GPU, at number 16, is integrated Radeon graphics, and the first of Team Red's discrete video cards is not even in the top 30 - the RX 580 is just outside it at number 31 with a share of 0.83%.