The difference a year can make: Nvidia’s RTX 40 series share of the Steam Hardware Survey has grown by 80% since last year, but its last-gen RTX chip still dominates.

Another month, and another set of results for Valve's survey on PC hardware. It's comforting knowing that some things don't change, but if you are Nvidia then it's even more comforting that one thing is different--in just 12 months its RTX-40-series desktop graphics cards and laptops have an 80% larger share of all surveyed machines.

In the October 2023 study, Ada Lovelace graphic processors accounted 10% of all sampled machines. The latest figures have risen to 17%. The number may not seem impressive, but it is a significant increase.

In order for something to increase, another must decrease. In the case of Nvidia GPUs, it was the GTX 10-series, aka Pascal, that saw the largest drop, from 16% down to 11%.

Turing and Ampere, the RTX 20 and RTX 30 series, are barely changed. The latter still dominates with over 30% of the sampled GPUs. The RTX 3060, the best of all, accounts for 7% of this survey.

The RTX-4060 (desktops and laptops) is very close, with 5% of each GPU's share in the survey.

AMD has done even better than last year, with RDNA3 chips increasing by almost 400% compared to the results of this survey. Don't get too excited. The RX 7000 series only accounts for 1% in the total survey. Intel's Arc chip actually accounts for 3%.

RDNA 2 GPUs went from being 2% to around 6% of the total (with the Radeon RX-6600 being the most common), but AMD's share of the survey is still small compared to Nvidia, reflecting the GPU market in general. AMD's CPUs are at least making progress. They account for just under 37% all the PCs sampled.

Steam survey results should be viewed with caution as always. Valve does not provide details on the sampling process or the number of machines that were sampled. I've always assumed that Valve's servers ping a random number of accounts in order to get them to respond to the survey call, but who really knows?

It's impossible to compare the survey to research on global share without knowing the sample size. However, I keep track of the monthly statistics to see if there are any patterns that can be identified.

The main reason is that RTX 30 series graphics cards and laptops GPUs are just as popular, if they're not more so, as they were in January 2023.

I suspect that part of the reason is that the current RTX models aren't exactly cheap. If PC gamers bought their Ampere graphics cards during the pandemic, when prices were high, they probably won't feel like spending the money again, or at least not until there is a noticeable improvement in gaming performance.

It will be interesting to see if Ampere ever gives up the survey crown, and if so, which GPU takes its place. Will it be Ada Lovelace after a few years? Please send us your answers on a postcard.