Despite being easily the fastest graphics card you can buy right now, the RTX 4090 is a niche product. At $1,600, it’s out of the conversation for the vast majority of gamers. Still, that hasn’t stopped the GPU from reaching a high ranking in Steam’s hardware survey. According to the latest survey, the RTX 4090 is in 0.96% of gaming PCs running Steam — more than any individual AMD GPU.
Although it’s no surprise that Nvidia tops the charts in the Steam hardware survey — the most recent report says Nvidia is represented in 76.59% of PCs compared to AMD’s 15.79% — it’s shocking to see such an expensive GPU rank so highly. Compared to last month, the RTX 4090 even gained 0.11%, despite only being available above list price.
By comparison, AMD’s flagship, the RX 7900 XTX, shows up in about 0.39% of gaming PCs — around the same level as the RTX 2080 Ti.
In fairness to AMD, the data in Steam’s hardware survey is far from perfect. For starters, there are two spots on the list simply labeled “AMD Radeon Graphics,” both of which comprise a larger slice of the pie than the RTX 4090 at 0.98% and 1.97%. If you divide this stat by the current-gen AMD GPUs not represented in the hardware survey — all of them short of the RX 7900 XTX — it’s still lower than the RTX 4090. That also doesn’t include integrated graphics through APUs like the Ryzen 7 8700G or handhelds that use an AMD chipset like the Asus ROG Ally.
In addition, the Steam hardware survey is a voluntary survey — it only represents a select number of Steam users that have agreed to take part. You can see a good representation of that in the language section of the survey. According to it, Simplified Chinese lost 3.21% compared to last month, and I’d wager that a good part of that drop is simply due to sampling different PCs.
Despite Nvidia dominating the top of the Steam charts, some value-focused AMD graphics cards still gained momentum. The RX 6600 and RX 6700XT both gained a fraction of a percent, as did the flagship RX 7900 XTX. The most popular AMD GPU in the survey remains the $200 RX 580, which has had a shocking amount of staying power. Even being close to seven years old, the budget GPU retains around 0.83%.
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Jacob Roach is the lead reporter for PC hardware at Digital Trends. In addition to covering the latest PC components, from…
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