Nvidia's RTX 3060 is the new Steam Survey king but something fishy is going on

Zotac RTX 3060 on a bright background.
(Image credit: Future)

Ray tracing is fo' real peeps. For proof, look no further than the latest Steam Hardware Survey, which places the a ray-tracing-capable GPU at the top of the tables for the first time. The GPU in question? None other than the Nvidia RTX 3060, now the most popular graphics card among surveyed Steam users.

If that seems inevitable given Nvidia's first RTX GPUs launched over four and a half years ago and pretty soon all new graphics cards will have hardware ray tracing acceleration, there is a catch. This particular Steam Survey looks a little fishy.

If you track the RTX 3060 over recent months, you'll see it gradually increasing market share over time in the survey. In November last year it was 3.41% of users, 3.88% the following month, it then actually dipped slightly to 3.67% in January, before hitting 4.36% in February and then...kaboom...10.67% of all Steam users in March.

The RTX 2060 saw a pretty big jump up in March, too, having sat pretty level for the previous four months. That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense given it's an old GPU that is essentially no longer on sale in most markets.

AMD also saw a sudden drop in overall GPU market share in March to 10.8% from 14.9% in February having remained at around 15% plus or minus a decimal point for several months previously.

Your next upgrade

(Image credit: Future)

Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD
Best gaming motherboard: The right boards
Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits
Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the rest

In the broad scheme of things, that's a huge change in one month and doesn't look plausible. Dig further into the data and one particular stat jumps out. In March, the proportion of surveyed Steam users reporting Simplified Chinese as their OS language exploded from 27.08% to 52.7%.

That, again, seems like a fairly bizarre and unlikely scenario. It's as if an army of Chinese gaming cafes have suddenly been given internet access.

Anyway, we'll probably never know for sure what it going on here. Some might argue this reflects a sudden unleashing of ex-mining cards. But was the RTX 3060 really ever big in mining?

One thing is for sure. We've seen fishy looking Steam surveys before. So, we'd advise waiting a few months for the numbers to settle down before assuming any of this is terribly accurate.

Jeremy Laird
Hardware writer

Jeremy has been writing about technology and PCs since the 90nm Netburst era (Google it!) and enjoys nothing more than a serious dissertation on the finer points of monitor input lag and overshoot followed by a forensic examination of advanced lithography. Or maybe he just likes machines that go “ping!” He also has a thing for tennis and cars.

Read more
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang holding an RTX 50-series card.
92% of Nvidia users turn on DLSS... if they've been lucky enough to bag an RTX 50-series card at launch AND have the Nvidia App installed
A screenshot of Valve's statistics from its monthly Steam Hardware Survey
Windows 10, 32 GB of RAM, and the RTX 4060 all surge to the top spot in the Steam Hardware Survey, seemingly due to a huge influx of Chinese-language user data
AMD RX 7900 XT with its original packaging.
AMD clawed back 7% graphics market share from Nvidia at the end of 2024, but the outlook for the whole industry in 2025 looks iffy
A collage of Radeon RX 9000 series graphics cards, as shown in AMD's promotional video for the launch of RDNA 4 at CES 2025
AMD claims it has 45% gaming GPU market share in Japan but jokingly admits it 'isn't used to selling graphics cards'
Nvidia DLSS 2.0
'We launched ray tracing and DLSS to a thud' reveals senior Nvidia suit reminiscing on the troubled launch of Nvidia's first RTX GPUs
Doomslayer pointing a gun at demons while giants fight in the background
Ray tracing is quickly becoming inescapable and I think it's time we bit the bullet and embraced it
Latest in Graphics Cards
Nvidia App
Hmmm, upgrades: Nvidia App gets an optional AI assistant and custom DLSS resolution scaling
A close-up photo of an Nvidia RTX 4070, with its heatsink removed, showing the AD104 GPU die and the surrounding Micron GDDR6X VRAM chips
With Nvidia Ace taking up 1 GB of VRAM in Inzoi, Team Green will need to up its memory game if AI NPCs take off in PC gaming
A collage of Radeon RX 9000 series graphics cards, as shown in AMD's promotional video for the launch of RDNA 4 at CES 2025
AMD's CEO claims 9070 XT sales are 10x higher than all previous Radeon generations but that's just for the first week of availability
Colorful iGame RTX 5070 Ti Vulcan OC graphics card from various angles
The RTX 5060 and RTX 5060 Ti are rumoured to be mere weeks away, with board partners reportedly required to ensure at least one MSRP model at launch
Nvidia headquarters
Nvidia CEO sets sights on making 'several hundred billion' dollars worth of electronics in the USA over the next four years, increasing the chance of your next GPU being made in America
The Asus ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 Dhahab Edition, a gold-plated graphics card on a sand dune background
A Jensen Huang-signed version of this golden Asus RTX 5090 will be auctioned off to support relief efforts for the California wildfires
Latest in News
The heroes are attacked by monsters
Pillars of Eternity is getting turn-based combat to mark its 10th anniversary, and that means PC Gamer editors will soon be arguing about combat mechanics again
Image of Ronaldo from Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves trailer
It doesn't really make sense that soccer star Ronaldo is now a Fatal Fury character, but if you follow the money you can see how it happened
Junah beginning a battle in Metaphor: ReFantazio.
Today's RPG fans are 'very sensitive to feeling like they wasted time' when they die, says Metaphor: ReFantazio battle planner—but Atlus still made combat hard anyway
Image of Cersei Lanniser from Game of Thrones: Kingsroad Steam early access trailer
A new Game of Thrones RPG is coming to Steam today with a cast of 'familiar faces,' which is good because it's really the only way to tell it's a GoT game at all
The new Prime Asset featured in the upcoming update for the Outlast Trials.
The Outlast Trials puts its already paranoid players under surveillance for a time-limited story event
A Viera looking confused in Final Fantasy 14.
Old armor continues to fall victim to Final Fantasy 14's bizarre two-channel dye system, unless you're super into changing the colour of teeny-tiny eyelets: 'Why even bother at this point?'