Steam's most widely used GPU is less powerful than you'd think, but new survey shows RTX 50-series is catching up

What graphics card do you use? I'm looking to upgrade at the moment as my old 30-series is starting to show the telltale signs of age when I'm trying to hit the top settings on triple-A games. However, prices never seem to come close to RRP, even in Black Friday sales and the like. A recent Steam survey has shown that I'm not alone, and plenty of others are also playing on older hardware. But the biggest surprise of all is that most users aren't rocking the best graphics card, and are instead opting for an Nvidia GPU made specifically for laptops.

Steam's hardware survey goes into the nitty gritty of your PC specs, but the graphics cards are always my first port of call. If you keep track of these things, it should be no major surprise to see that the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU is top dog, seeing as it's been sniffing around the higher ends of survey responses for months now.

If you're less well-versed in the GPU goings-on, the laptop 4060 is so popular because, well, it's built into a bunch of good laptops. For well under $1,000, you can find a laptop with a custom 4060 that will play almost any game at 1080p. For many gamers, that's enough. When you consider that the top three games on Steam are Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, and PUBG: Battlegrounds, it becomes clear where players' priorities lie. You don't need 4K textures or ray-tracing, you need a decent frame rate that a laptop with a 1080p display and an RTX 4060 can provide.

However, the 4060 (laptop version) has slowly taken over from the regular 4060, which was top dog nine months ago. Does this suggest that players are moving away from pre-built PCs (which often included the 4060) and towards laptops?

However, it's also worth noting that Nvidia's 50-series graphics cards are picking up some traction as players get their hands on the latest tech. The RTX 5070 in particular is growing in popularity, ranking as the 11th most-common card among players surveyed. However, if it continues to increase its market share at a similar rate, it could reach the top five by in the new year.

Elsewhere, while RAM prices skyrocket, the vast majority of players are sticking with the standard 16gb or 32gb configurations. More players have also adopted Windows 11, which is no surprise considering Microsoft recently forced an update to compatible PCs.