Valve has updated the Steam hardware survey with December numbers:
As you can see, huge gains for RTX Turing GPUs, RTX 3080 also doubled the percentage, but no other Ampere or RDNA2 cards yet in the statistic.
The gain of the RTX20x0-GPUs in itself ain't surprising:
- due to many new PC game releases in October - December with higher hardware requirements many PC gamers want to upgrade their systems
- due to the colder season and Corona lockdowns more PC gamers have to stay at home
- due to canceled vacations many also have money to spent for home entertainment instead for travelling/cinema/theatre...
- more and more PC games support raytracing, so for RT-interested gamers the options are RTX Turing, RTX Ampere and Big Navi (RDNA2)
- most RTX Ampere and RDNA2 graphic cards are out of stock or currently overpriced
- RTX Turing cards are available and their prices have fallen since the Ampere/RDNA2 price announcements
So even without RTX 3060Ti/3070/3090 + RX 6800/6800XT/6900XT numbers the percentage of raytracing compatible systems on Steam took a huge step from 12 to 17 percent. Depending on the number of estimated active Steam users (100 - 200 million) these 17% would be 17 to 34 million raytracing-compatible gaming PCs already:
If the RDNA2 and other Ampere cards were already visible in the hardware survey, 20% RT-compatibility (so 20 - 40 million PCs) are probable. Just take a look in this data:
Every Nvidia/AMD/Intel GPU currently sold is (of course) DX12-compatible, but the DX12-GPUs have fallen 3 percentage points over the last months while the DX8-GPUs (and older) have risen 4 percentage points.
So probably the gained 4 percentage points "DX 8 and older" are new DX12-GPUs not properly tagged in the survey data, very probably Ampere and RDNA2 GPUs.
Unspecified Nvidia GPUs are shown as "NVIDIA Graphics Device" in the data. For a long time this was around 0.5% and probably mainly Nvidia Quadro cards, but it has grown the last months 2.2 percentage points... these are probably Ampere cards. The remaining 1 - 2 percentage points gain of "DX 8 and older" could be RDNA2.
The next months will show if my theory can hold up, when more and more Ampere and RDNA2 cards show up in the hardware survey and get correctly tagged as "DX 12 compatible", which would result in less than 3% "DX8 and older" GPUs and at least 93% DX12-GPUs.
Last edited by Conina - on 03 January 2021
