Remember when we observed that Nvidia's RTX 3060 was the new Steam Survey king but something fishy was going on? Well, Steam latest numbers are out and, you guessed it, the data has gone back to "normal", returning the 3060 from whence it came.
We also can't help notice just how badly AMD does compared to Nvidia by some measures. Hold that thought, we'll come back to it.
Steam's March figures saw the RTX 3060 leap up to over 10% share of all gamers using the platform. Previously, the 3060 had been ticking along in the high 3% to low 4% range. The latest figures for April return the 3060 to 4.66% of all gamers on Steam. That's much more plausible.
The April numbers also mean that the RTX 3060 drops back down to third place overall, behind the GTX 1650 in first place and the GTX 1060 in second.
Of course, even though the latest Steam results do look more plausible, numerous caveats remain. Just for starters, thanks to the vagaries of device IDs, Steam counts laptop and desktop GTX 1650 GPUs together, while the RTX 3060 desktop numbers are counted separately from RTX 3060 mobile graphics.
Taken together, mobile and desktop variants of the RTX 3060 account for 9.17% of gamers in the latest survey, well above the GTX 1650's 6.19% share. Add in Ti variants of the 3060 and it has an even bigger lead at 13.44%.
The 3060 still wins even if you add up all the 1650, 1650 Ti and 1650 Super variants, which come to 8.83%.
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
What the adjusted numbers still also show is the overall popularity of Nvidia's RTX 30-series GPUs, which clock in at just under 30% of overall Steam gamers. Shockingly, that's 10 times higher than AMD's equivalent Radeon RX 6000 series, which combined don't quite reach 3% of overall share. Yikes.
Overall, these Steam survey numbers have always been a bit messy. They need to be scanned with a certain appreciation of the various shortcomings and anomalies. The fact that several GPUs leapt up the tables last month, only to be demoted shortly afterwards say it all.
But as a rough guide to what GPUs are doing well out there in the real world as opposed to the review circuit and the YouTube rumour mill, it remains one of the most useful tools we have.
