One of Nvidia's Best graphics cards, the GeForce RTX 3060, has dropped from first place in the latest Steam Hardware Survey, falling to third place in just one month. Well, sort of. There was some very unusual data in last month's Steam Hardware Survey, which caused several Nvidia GPUs to spike extraordinarily high in adoption rates. Things have apparently been corrected, with the affected GPUs returning to normal.
The adoption rates, particularly for the RTX 3060 (desktop and laptop variants), GTX 1060, RTX 2060, and GTX 1650 changed drastically in Steam's Hardware Survey during the month of April (which reports on GPU market share in March). The RTX 3060 (desktop) sat at the top, replacing the GTX 1650 as the most popular GPU among Steam gamers and garnering a whopping 6.31% increase in "market share" in just a single month's time.
The second place position was also shaken up with the RTX 2060 replacing the GTX 1060, garnering an impressive (and highly unlikely) 3.42% uptick in popularity among Steam gamers, with the GTX 1060 falling to third place as a result. But the GTX 1060 also saw an unusually high 2.57% uptick in adoption rates as well. Filling out the rest of the top five GPUs in April were the RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 Ti, which both had outlier increases of 2.52% and 2.14%, respectively. Meanwhile, users with RTX 3060 Laptop GPUs saw a big drop to eighth place, where previously (before April) it was in third place.
This was all quite unusual, as the month-to-month GPU changes typically vary by less than 0.5% in the Steam Hardware Survey. Increases and decreases of several percent obviously indicated something went very wrong with Steam's data collection. With that issue fixed, we're greeted by similarly large changes in the opposite direction for May's results.
