Where did you guys come up with all this money? Somehow, Nvidia's RTX 4090 (opens in new tab) first appeared in Steam's hardware survey (opens in new tab) this January, jumping ahead of any of AMD's high-end graphics cards.

The AMD RX 6800 XT (open in new tab) is one of the best GPUs the Red Team has ever released, although it has been available since late 2020, although I understand that the pandemic/chip shortage fun times made it a bit harder to buy, It is behind Nvidia's ~$2,000 graphics cards.

And that's even considering that Radeon cards have been steadily gaining popularity and market share in Steam surveys since at least September.

Indeed, as a recent reddit thread (open in new tab) points out, the RX 6800 XT even lags behind the later $999 version of AMD's RDNA 2 GPU architecture, the RX 6900 XT (open in new tab). I understand that it was a later release with a fairly significant price drop, but damn.

Still, according to collected Steam Hardware Survey data, the RX 580 is AMD's most popular discrete graphics card, outnumbering the RTX 4090, RX 6800 XT, and RX 6900 XT combined. In other words, AMD has at least that. [However, it goes without saying that the Steam Hardware Survey is a purely representative sample of the technology used by gamers with Steam installed, not a complete record of the percentage of GPUs out there.

Nevertheless, it is expected that every RTX 4090 owner who was offered the opportunity to submit their gaming PC specs to Steam at login would have undoubtedly clicked "Accept." After all, when you spend thousands of dollars on a GPU, you want as many people as possible to know about it.

Gabe must have been impressed.

Still, this is representative in a way, and sometimes it is easy to forget how dominant Nvidia is in the GPU market, despite how good AMD's RX 6000 series graphics cards have proven to be. In other words, we still can't believe that anyone would choose the RTX 3060 over the superior RX 6700 XT (open in new tab).

The RTX 3060 is cheaper, faster, and better. And we won't stop saying this until you guys listen or Intel's Arc cards become much more consistent or competitively priced RTX 40 series or RX 7000 series GPUs actually appear.

Maybe someday that will happen.