Steam hardware survey shows RTX graphics cards growing in number

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A new Steam hardware and software survey is out, and with it comes some interesting trends that can be observed. For one, we see an uptick in the number of GeForce RTX series graphics cards.

Ownership among Steam users rose 0.31 percent from the end of April to the end of May. Not surprisingly, the bulk of those were RTX 2060 upgrades, as that is the least expensive graphics card with dedicated RT cores to handle the brunt of ray-traced workloads.

In a vacuum, a 0.31 percent rise spread out among four GPUs is not eye-popping, and neither are the individual gains. However, compared against every other GPU surveyed, RTX adoption last month was among the highest. Here's a look at the cards that saw the biggest gains in May:

• Radeon HD 8600 series—0.17 percent gain
• GeForce GTX 1070—0.14 percent gain
• GeForce RTX 2060—0.14 percent gain
• GeForce GTX 1660 Ti—0.12 percent gain
• GeForce RTX 2070—0.10 percent gain

Pascal cards are getting more difficult to find at fair prices, and so it's interesting that the GTX 1070 was among the top gainers. That's likely the result of the second-hand market, both from the continued dump of cryptocurrency mining hardware, and from gamers who have opted to upgrade to something new. There's also statistical margin of error, which Steam doesn't provide.

Both the GTX 1660 (non-TI) and GTX 1650 are still missing in action. Probably not entirely, but apparently there are not enough users to register a blip on Steam's monthly survey. It will be interesting to see how that changes in the months to come, and of course AMD has new Navi cards in the wings.

One other note about GPUs—the RTX 2070 (0.91 percent overall) is nipping at the heels of AMD's Radeon RX 580 (1.2 percent overall), and may overtake it within the next few months. The most popular cards continue to be the GTX 1060 (15.69 percent) and GTX 1050 Ti (9.54 percent).

Outside of hardware, Windows 10 made some noticeable movement last month. The 64-bit version jumped 0.66 percent while the 32-bit version stood largely pat (+0.01 percent). Overall, Windows 10 now accounts for more than 68 percents of all Steam users. Linux, meanwhile, sits at under 1 percent.

Finally, the survey continues to show that the vast majority of gamers play at 1920x1080 (62.46 percent). A distant second is 1366x768 (12.48 percent), while 4K adoption is near the bottom (1.6 percent).