Shockingly, Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4060 just lost its top gaming GPU spot on Steam

Nvidia's mid-range graphics cards have, for years, dominated the most-used gaming GPU chart in Valve's monthly Steam Hardware Survey. For a long time, its GTX 1060 cards ruled, with its RTX 2060 and RTX 3060 cards taking over as the years passed. Sure enough, the RTX 4060 went on to claim the title, but this month has seen a surprise change.

Instead of Nvidia's last-gen mid-range champion continuing to sit at the top of the charts, the company's older RTX 3060 has regained the crown. The number of Steam users using the 3060 has risen from 4.41% in the previous survey to 4.47%. That doesn't make it the best graphics card option right now, but merely the most commonly used on the platform. Meanwhile, both the laptop RTX 4060 GPU (the model that previously topped the chart) and the desktop RTX 4060 have seen their share of users drop.

The movements here are very small, and still result in the same three GPUs occupying the top three spots. It's just that the order has changed. It's still notable, however, given how rare it is to see an older GPU come back to the top spot once a new generation has established itself.

Also notable is just how steady the overall percentage of users with an RTX 3060 has been over the last five months. In June's survey, it had 4.57%, and now in September's survey, it still has 4.47%. This would seem to suggest that owners of this card are not yet seeing a reason to upgrade.

Indeed, the big shift that finally saw users move on from the GTX 1060/1660 era was the arrival of the RTX 3060, as it brought a large enough leap in performance, along with modern features such as ray tracing and DLSS. Seemingly, the jump in performance from that card to the likes of the RTX 4060 and RTX 5060 hasn't been enough to warrant another upgrade - a situation not helped by the low amount of VRAM in these cards, as we explore in our RTX 5060 review.

As for why the RTX 5060 and other RTX 5000 series cards aren't yet topping the chart, we do tend to see a significant delay between the launch of a new series of cards and them becoming widely adopted. The RTX 4060 only hit such heights in March this year, nearly two years after its launch.

Elsewhere, the story of this month's Steam Hardware Survey remains much the same as last month, with AMD continuing to hardly make a dent in the GPU usage stats, though its generic "AMD Radeon Graphics" entry has risen one place, from 10th to 9th. However, the company is steadily chipping away at Intel's lead in the CPU usage chart. Meanwhile, Linux has, for the first time, hit 3% usage on the platform, which is a result largely driven by the Steam Deck.

Are you still using an RTX 3060 or was it the RTX 4060 that finally pushed you to upgrade? If so, what performance and features will you be looking for in a possible future RTX 6060 card that would make it tempting enough to upgrade? Let us know your thoughts over on our community Discord server.