In a nutshell: It’s the start of a new month. As such, we’re taking our regular look at the Steam hardware survey. The most interesting stat from May is in the world of graphics cards. Despite their unending availability problems, the RTX 3060 and RTX 3070 saw the largest gains last month, sharing the honor with the GTX 1650.
While it remains number one, the GTX 1060’s near three-and-a-half-year reign as the top GPU is looking shaky. The number of survey participants using the Pascal card fell yet again, dropping to 8.95%. The GeForce GTX 1650, meanwhile, experienced the joint-highest increase in users last month (+0.10%), moving it ever closer to the second place GTX 1050 Ti.
We’ve predicted that the GTX 1650, which was also the best-performing card in April, could eventually take the top position, given that Nvidia is increasing the supply of the Turing product to ease global availability problems.
Also experiencing a 0.10% increase were the RTX 3070 and the RTX 3060—the latter having only entered the chart last month—illustrating how some people are managing to get hold of the cards. The laptop version of the RTX 3060 has also made its way onto the list, grabbing a 0.21% user share.
The RTX 3070 is the highest Ampere card, taking the 16th slot, while there were slight gains for the RTX 3080 (0.05%) and the RTX 3090 (0.01%). As per usual, there’s still no sign of AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 series.
There is good news for AMD in the CPU space. After months of closing the gap on rival Intel, team red has finally passed the 30%-share milestone.
Elsewhere, Windows 10 64-bit continues to dominate with its 92.87% share, while the Oculus Quest 2 is the most popular VR headset by far; its 29.3% share is 10% larger than the second-place Oculus Rift S.
With the RTX 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti arriving in a few days, it’ll be interesting to see when those two cards enter the Steam survey—and how difficult buying one will prove.