There are few ways that we have to know, more or less, the most used hardware by users. Currently, there is only one gaming platform that collects hardware data from users. This weekend the steam hardware data of the month of March and we see a big turnaround on graphics cards.
We must reiterate once again that Steam statistics are not 100% reliable. Data of users who have not accessed the platform for a long time are kept, something that dilutes the data. Despite this, we can see some interesting things.
NVIDIA busts Steam stats
There is something that does not change in the Steam statistics and it is the dominance of NVIDIA against AMD and Intel. The curious thing is that this month there is a brutal change in the data reflected. Normally we see variations of at most 2%, but something has happened (that we are unaware of) that changes the data wildly.
The first thing we see is that NVIDIA went from having a share of 75.8% in February to a 82.63% in March. This implies a strong fall from its competitors. AMD goes from 14.9% in February to 10.82% in March. It is also stamped Intelwhich goes from 9% in February to 6.33% in March.
But it is not the only relevant data we have. In February the most common graphics card was the NVIDIA GTX 1650, which managed to unseat the GTX 1060. Well, the GTX 1650 falls by 1.96%, which is a brutal drop. The first position becomes the RTX 3060 with a huge rise of 6.23%which is more than double its presence in February.
The RTX 2060 (+3.4%), the RTX 1060 (+2.6%), the RTX 3070 (+2.5%) and the RTX 3060 Ti (+2.13%) are also rising strongly.
Interestingly, a lot of AMD graphics cards disappear in the Steam stats. We can not see nowhere the AMD RX 6000 Series and we barely see the presence of the RX5000. The first dedicated (not integrated) graphics card is the AMD RX 580, a graphics card released in 2017.
Lots of weird stuff this month on Steam
We see many changes in the statistics of the largest video game platform in the world. There are other data that vary significantly with respect to the month of February. These are:
- Operating system: Windows 10 rises 11.62%
- RAM memory: the capacity of 16 GB rises 4.2%
- Intel processor frequency: the range between 2.7 GHz and 2.99 GHz increases by 11.96%
- Physical cores: 6 core count up 12.36%
- VRAM memory amount: 8 GB of VRAM up 4.1%
- Main language: Chinese up 25.35%
- Total storage capacity: 1TB capacity up 18.96%
As we can see, there are many parameters that rise a lot, more than 10%, something quite abnormal. Most likely, the platform is doing some kind of cleaning of its statistics. It is possible that data from users who have not connected to the video game store for years will begin to be downloaded.
You can see in the accumulated statistics how there is a stabilization of data, without major fluctuations. It is the first time that we have seen such a sudden change in the statistics of the platform. We therefore have quite distorted data at the moment. We will have to wait until next month, when the data for March are published, to be able to draw any conclusions or reflections.
