There are few ways to know, more or less, the hardware most used by users. Currently, there is only one gaming platform that collects user hardware data. This weekend the Steam hardware data of March and we see a big turnaround on graphics cards.
We have to repeat once again that Steam statistics are not 100% reliable. The data of users who have not accessed the platform for a long time is retained, which dilutes the data. Despite this, we can see some interesting things.
NVIDIA breaks Steam stats
There is something that does not change in the Steam statistics and it is the dominance of NVIDIA against AMD and Intel. What is curious is that this month there is an abrupt change in the data reflected. Normally we see variations of at most 2%, but something has happened (that we are not aware of) that changes the data a lot.
The first thing we see is that Nvidia went from a share of 75.8% in February to a 82.63% in March. This implies a strong fall of 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 these are not the only relevant data we have. In February, the most common graphics card was the NVIDIA GTX 1650, which managed to topple the GTX 1060. Well, the GTX 1650 drops by 1.96%, which is a steep drop. The first position becomes the RTX 3060 with a huge 6.23% boostmore than double its presence in February.
The RTX 2060 (+3.4%), RTX 1060 (+2.6%), RTX 3070 (+2.5%) and RTX 3060 Ti (+2.13%) are also progressing strongly.
Interestingly, many AMD graphics cards are disappearing in Steam stats. We can’t see nowhere the AMD RX 6000y series you can barely see the presence of RX5000. The first dedicated (non-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 considerably from the month of February. These are:
- Operating system: Windows 10 up 11.62%
- RAM memory: 16 GB capacity increases by 4.2%
- Intel processor frequency: the range between 2.7 GHz and 2.99 GHz increases by 11.96%
- Physical cores: 6 cores up 12.36%
- Amount of VRAM memory: 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 go up a lot, more than 10%, something quite abnormal. Most likely, the platform is doing some sort of cleaning of its stats. Data from users who haven’t logged into the game store for years may begin to download.
You can see in the accumulated statistics how there is a stabilization of the data, without major fluctuations. This is the first time that we have seen such a drastic change in the platform’s statistics. So we have quite skewed data at the moment. We will have to wait until next month, when the March data is released, to be able to draw any conclusions or thoughts.
