Valve Hardware Survey for March—AMD still can't make a dent in Nvidia's massive lead

HardwareValve Hardware Survey for March—AMD still can’t make a dent in Nvidia’s massive leadWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Future)

PC hardware

It’s that time of the month again, when Valve publishes statistics for itslatest hardware survey. All the key details about the different gaming PCs sampled are there for viewing and while the figures for March don’t contain anything hugely significant, the long term trends show that PC gamers upgrading from older GPUs are mostly switching to Nvidia’s latest RTX 40-series ofgraphics cards.

AMD’s last generation of chips is still at 3.1% and a reasonable slice of that is the GPU in theOLED-version Steam Deck. Labelled as ‘AMD Custom GPU 0405’, that chip holds 0.67% of the total GPU share in the survey. While that might not look like much, it’s AMD’s fourth highest entry in Valve’s GPU listing, with theRadeon RX 580and a bunch of integrated GPUs coming ahead of the Steam Deck.

As for Nvidia, well it’s graphics cards form a smidge under 72% of the total survey, with the GeForce RTX 30-series forming the largest part of this at 27.8%. The older GTX 10-series and RTX 20 and 16-series of cards have been slowly decreasing in the figures, and it’s been the latest Ada Lovelace products that have filled those places.

If you think that means there are no mega-bucks cards near the top of the list, then think again. The wallet-conqueringRTX 4090is 30th and theRTX 4080is only two positions lower.

As always, though, these figures can’t quite be taken at face value, as without any information about the surveying method (e.g. sample size or geographic distribution), there’s no way of telling just how representative Valve’s survey is for PC gaming as a whole.

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That said, the industry doesn’t completely ignore it, and will use the figures alongside other company data to determine what the potential user base for a game will be running with.

Your next upgrade(Image credit: Future)Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD.Best gaming motherboard: The right boards.Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits.Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the rest.

Your next upgrade

(Image credit: Future)Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD.Best gaming motherboard: The right boards.Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits.Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the rest.

(Image credit: Future)

Nvidia RTX 4070 and RTX 3080 Founders Edition graphics cards

Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD.Best gaming motherboard: The right boards.Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits.Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the rest.

And it’s a similar picture with monitors, with 1080p panels taking the lion’s share at 58% and 1440p at just under 20%. 4K remains at around 3.4% and doesn’t show much sign of changing.

The one thing to note in the March figures is that the most common OS language used is Simplified Chinese, at 33.4%, whereas English is at 32.5%—the former has been consistently increasing in share over the last few surveys, and this can be attributed to the fact that there’s only been aChina-only version of Steamfor a few years.

As the months roll on, I suspect that Chinese will be the number one language permanently, given the sheer number of PC gamers in that country.

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