Raytracing is real. As proof, the latest Steam hardware survey (opens in new tab) shows that for the first time ever, a GPU that supports ray tracing is at the top of the list. That GPU is none other than the Nvidia RTX 3060 (opens in new tab), which is currently the most popular graphics card among the Steam users surveyed.

This might seem inevitable given that Nvidia's first RTX GPU was released over four and a half years ago and that soon all new graphics cards will feature hardware ray tracing acceleration. This particular Steam survey is a bit dubious.

Tracking the RTX 3060 over the last few months, this survey shows that its market share has been gradually increasing over time. Last November it was 3.41% of users, the following month it was 3.88%, in January it dropped slightly to 3.67%, in February it was 4.36%, and in March it was ..... .10.67%.

The RTX 2060 (open in new tab) also saw a fairly large jump in March, after being virtually flat for the previous four months. This does not seem to make much sense given that this is an older GPU that has essentially been discontinued in most markets.

AMD also saw its overall GPU market share plummet from 14.9% in February to 10.8% in March.

In the grand scheme of things, this is a big change in one month, and it does not seem plausible. Digging deeper into the data, one particular statistic jumps out at us: in March, the percentage of surveyed Steam users who said they use Simplified Chinese as their OS language exploded from 27.08% to 52.7%.

This also seems like a rather odd and unlikely scenario. It is as if an army of Chinese game cafes suddenly had access to the Internet.

In any case, we will probably never know for sure what is going on here. Some might argue that this reflects the sudden unleashing of the former mine card. But was the RTX 3060 really a big player in mining?

One thing is certain. We have seen some dubious research on Steam before. For that reason, we recommend waiting a few months for the numbers to settle down before assuming that these numbers are terribly accurate.