In brief: There's a new GPU leader in Valve's Steam survey. Having consistently seen the most gains in this segment for months, the RTX 3060 has finally surpassed the GTX 1650 to sit at the top of the graphics card chart.
September was yet another month in which the RTX 3060 proved to be the top-performing (up 1.4%) GPU among Steam survey participants. The expensive prices of the RTX 4060 and 4060 Ti and their comparatively weak performance combined with the RTX 3060's high availability on the second-hand market have pushed the Ampere card into more gamers' machines. It now sits atop the main GPU chart with a 6.27% share, ahead of the GTX 1650 - the former number one – which is found in 4.78% of participants' machines.
September was a pretty good month for the Lovelace cards, too. Only the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 failed to make gains, with the RTX 4060 proving to be the series' best performer, up 0.31%. AMD's Radeon RX 7900 XTX, meanwhile, is its only newer card on the main chart. It fell 0.02% and is currently in 73rd position.
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Last month wasn't the first time the RTX 3060 took the top spot on the main GPU chart. It happened in March, too, but there were a number of unusual changes that month; the RTX 3060 saw a massive 6.2% month-on-month increase, which is pretty much unheard of. Valve never gave an explanation, and the survey results returned to normal in April with the RTX 3060 dropping from the top position.
Elsewhere on the survey, several categories saw their trends reverse. Windows 11 has been closing the gap on Windows 10 for months, but the older OS moved further ahead by almost 2% to nearly 58% in September as Windows 11 fell by 1.79% to 37.4%.
Another change to the status quo took place in the CPU chart. AMD has spent most of this year closing the (still admittedly large) gap between itself and Intel, but Team Red fell by 2.24% at the last count as Team Blue increased its share to 68.77%. Intel could widen the gap further when the Raptor Lake Refresh chips land in a few weeks.
Elsewhere, having six physical CPUs solidified its place as the most common result after it went up 2.74%. Most people have over 1TB of drive space but just 100GB to 249GB free – not a surprise, given the size of games these days – while the most typical amount of VRAM remained at 8GB, something more titles are struggling with.
Finally, English remains the most common language, but only by a 0.11% margin after Simplified Chinese climbed 5.34%.