Steam Hardware Survey March 2022: The biggest winners
As GPU availability improves, the PC market shifts
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The Steam Hardware Survey has once again been updated. For those who are not in the know, Valve runs the Steam Hardware Survey for opted-in users, and takes note of everything about their hardware setup. Each month, they round up the results and post them on Steam’s website. It can be used to glean information about the latest PC gaming trends, and keen battlegrounds in the highly-competitive industry.
GTX 1060 is still the GPU king, but the 3060 isn’t far behind.
The budget king of GPUs, Nvidia’s GTX 1060 has actually seen a slight uplift in users, and is up +0.19% last month, which is around the same levels as we’ve seen in December 2021. However, there are also two other big winners here, and the GPU which has increased in market share the most over the last five months is the RTX 3060, which has steadily been gaining users, with the number of people using the card almost doubling in comparison to the number of gamers who had them in November.
We always expected that the ’60’ cards in Nvidia’s stack will always do well, and the 3060 has a long way to go if it wants to topple the domination of the 1060 and 2060, but with growth like this, we could see the GTX 1060 toppled before the year is over. If we could laptop SKUs, the total market share for the 3060 amounts to 3.1%, which has the GPU nipping at the heels of the GTX 1050, which is the 5th most used GPU today.
Comparatively, the RTX 3050 is still not gaining too much momentum quite yet, even after its official discrete launch earlier this year. But, it could just be a card that builds momentum slowly over time rather than one that explodes into existence, so it also has the chance of increasing in the rankings pretty significantly.
What will be interesting to see in upcoming hardware surveys is the
Intel’s strong showing in the price to performance ratios of its 12th generation systems, which exploited a pricing gap in the midrange market that AMD failed to fill in the bub $200 USD range, with the 5600X debuting at $309, while Intel’s offering, the 12400F managed to reach a modest $180 by comparison. These two CPUs are quite comparable in performance, so it meant that many builders who were saved with teh decision of going with Intel or AMD have seemingly gone with Intel.
This shows just how volatile the market really is, with the customer not being brand-loyal, but instead searching out for their own performant solutions with little regard for what brand they might choose. Therefore, companies should think twice before becoming complacent and using their advantages to drive up the prices of their products. The market is fickle, and you can lose that momentum just as quickly as you gained it. AMD needs to respond in kind to 12th gen, but it might not be by releasing the 5600 far, far too late.
