Purchases by miners, limited production capacity and skyrocketing prices have undoubtedly led to NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3000 in fewer gaming PCs than possible, but nonetheless the success of Ampere GPUs is there for all to see, and not just because the US firm has been grinding impressive quarterly results for a long time.
Even the Steam Hardware and Software survey certifies a trend that had already been reported by NVIDIA itself in April. Looking at the numbers it seems that the players have decided to jump into the new generation of GPUs faster than what was done with the previous Turing solutions.
Sure, the survey data doesn’t represent all Steam users, just the systems on which users allow the software to track hardware, plus there may be other variables to consider (even the release of a particular game can weigh on on buying a GPU), but they undoubtedly give some useful information to understand the scenario.
If you take an availability window of the RTX 3000 range from September 2020 to October 2021, we see that desktop GPUs overall Ampere have one today 5.74% share, divided as follows:
- GeForce RTX 3090: 0.44%
- GeForce RTX 3080 Ti: 0.31%
- GeForce RTX 3080: 1.04%
- GeForce RTX 3070 Ti: 0.31%
- GeForce RTX 3070: 1.7%
- GeForce RTX 3060 Ti: 0.81%
- GeForce RTX 3060: 1.13%
If, on the other hand, we return to September 2018, the month of the debut of the Turing GPUs, and go until October 2019, a figure emerges for the GeForce RTX 2000 4.97%. In particular, the shares of the individual cards were as follows:
- GeForce RTX 2080 Ti: 0.56%
- GeForce RTX 2080: 0.92%
- GeForce RTX 2070 Super: 0.26%
- GeForce RTX 2070: 1.47%
- GeForce RTX 2060 Super: 0.16%
- GeForce RTX 2060: 1.6%
Despite all the difficulties in buying a GeForce RTX 3000, between limited availability and crazy prices, even the data confirm what NVIDIA has stated several times, namely that they sell everything they produce very quickly. There is a great hunger for GPUs as well there are many who have knowingly skipped the RTX 2000 series aware that the next one would surely bring big improvements on the performance front with ray tracing, as it was.
That said, there is a sea of opportunities for both NVIDIA and rival AMD to win the hearts of gamers, considering that the GeForce GTX 1060 still remains the most popular gaming video card with a figure of 8.08%.