Game News
Since its release in 2016 the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 has been the most used graphics card. The now low-end GPU has always been popular due to the performance it offers relative to its low price. However, November’s Steam Hardware & Software Survey has revealed that the Nvidia GTX 1060 is no longer king.
However, the GTX 1060 hasn’t been replaced by a newer more powerful card. Instead, it it is the GTX 1650, a budget GPU that was released in 2019. Despite being newer than the GTX 1060 the 1650 is a considerably weaker graphics card.
The games that best show off the performance gap between the two cards are GTA V and PUBG. At 1080p resolution the 1060 manages around 70 FPS in GTA V whilst the 1650 only reaches around 50 FPS. As for PUBG, the GTX 1650 caps out at 50 FPS whilst the superior 1060 can sustain 80 FPS.
The Steam survey is a bit misleading though as it looks as though the GTX 1650 has dethroned the Nvidia GTX 1060. In reality the RTX 3060 Laptop GPU and regular RTX 3060 are listed separately. When you combine their market share it turns out that over 8% of computers using Steam have an RTX 3060. That exceeds the 6.3% using a 1650 and the 5.7% using a 1060.
PC Gamers are finally moving on
A big reason why so many PC gamers were holding onto old graphics cards was the crypto explosion. Crypto mining became huge a few years back massively increasing the demand and cost of high-performance graphics cards. Now that the craze has died down Steam users can finally swap out their aged GTX 1060 for a newer and more powerful GPU. You can expect the market share of RTX series cards to sky rocket in the coming years.
