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December Steam Hardware Survey shows GTX 970 as most popular GPU

If you are a PC gamer, then chances are you often use Steam, which means that the Steam Hardware Survey is actually a pretty nice source of information from time to time. According to Valve's results from December, Windows 7 is still the most popular operating system, with Windows 10 coming in second, most people use 8GB of RAM and the GTX 970 is the most popular graphics card at the moment.

According to the report, 80.75 percent of Steam users surveyed are using a DirectX 11 GPU while 15.86 percent are still running a DirectX 10 graphics card. The GTX 970 was the top GPU in December, with 4.89 percent of those surveyed using it, the Intel HD4000 integrated graphics came in a close second place.

nvidia-geforce-gtx-970

As usual, the most popular monitor resolution is still 1920×1080, with 35.15 percent of people sticking to it. 1.28 percent of those surveyed have made the jump to 2560×1440 while just 0.7 percent of those surveyed are currently running a UHD/4K display.

No survey is ever 100% accurate as not everyone takes part and we don't know exactly how many people did. However, this does seem like a fairly good indication given how huge Steam is.

KitGuru Says: The GTX 970 is the recommended GPU for those looking to game on the Oculus Rift, so the fact that it is the most popular graphics card could bode well for the future of VR on PC. 

 

 

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28 comments

  1. The latter comment seems strange. VR is going to be really expensive, so just because a lot of people can use it, it need not be the case that a lot of people will use it. Mostly it will be early adapters with money to burn.

  2. I still cant get why people keep buying the GTX970 with the 3,5gb of vram. Or maybe has everyone forgotten that already? Also, At the same prize you can buy a R9 390 which is a better performer and you can add another 50$ to get an R9 390x. Or at least save some more and get a frickin GTX 980 for 480$

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  4. Or you can look at this way, the R9 390 doesn’t offer much more performance at all to justify the amount of power it uses (a full 100watts max more than the 970 for a little boost in performance) and the amount of heat it puts out compared to the GTX 970, giving a clear reason why you should pick the 970 over the 390

  5. By referring to the power consumption I hope you dont mean its gonna cost more in electricity over time, because given the cost of the electricity the difference will be minimal unless you game 24/7.
    Now about the amount of heat, it depends to the total heat dissipation ability of your build and case, a strong point but not a clear reason at all.
    I personally would choose a GTX 980/980 ti as a clear winner in all these aspects and best value for money, but for the lower prize that 0,5gb pool thing is forbidding for me, because heat can be delt with one way or another, that cant.

  6. According to that logic, why not keep saving and buy a 980Ti, or a Titan X. For some people the added power is completely unnecessary and they’d rather spend the extra €150/$150 some other way. As well they should. And who cares about the RAM? People forgot, because it virtually doesn’t affect gameplay, unless you want to play at 1440p or 4k, and in those cases you want 8GB anyway.

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  8. AMD probably suffered from their poorly optimized and always late drivers over the last years, which resulted in bad reputation from those who were previously using AMD GPU.

    Add to that Nvidia has support from lots of AAA games which are using gameworks proprietary tech.

    Considering all AMD have done for the industry/market (non-proprietary apis, etc.), I really hope this “gen” (GCN 1.2+) will bring back some trust.

  9. The “3.5GB” thing was over blown massively. It’s a 4GB card, and that’s that.

    I though people saying you only need 4GB for 1080p+ are not telling the whole truth. I have 1080p and a 980GTX and often see 3.7-8GB used for new games. Assassin’s Creed Syndicate pushes that absolutely.

  10. Ill take compute performance over power efficiency any day.

  11. My point exactly.
    A properly optimized game should not normally hit more than 3 gb in 1080p but thats almost never the case. Console ports keep getting worst and games are more and more demanding, not to mention the lack of optimization from the companies. So the 0,5gb of vram that is on that seperate slow pool is gonna contantly slow down the whole card in the near future.

  12. Practice doesn’t show this though. And being fair, Assassins Creed Syndicate shows 3.8GB usage on my vRAM, but performance is utterly terrible at that point because to use it I need the PCSS Ultra shadows on, which destroys performance anyway.

    My friend has the 970 and he hasn’t noticed a problem on the same game with the same settings. The card performs slower than mine, as you’d expect, within the same levels you’d expect even if more than 3.5GB wasn’t in use.

    I’m pretty sure NVidia’s drivers are intentionally dropping it below 3.5GB though, as he finds it hard to go above it! haha.

  13. You are seeing that usage because you have the vram and your card uses RAM dynamically. For a long time people with GTX 780s and 780 Tis would see 2.5-3GB vram usage at 1080p in games that had absolutely no issues running on a 770 at the same resolution.

    I’m yet to run into an issue with the 970’s vram at 4K, so when people tell me that you need more than that for 1080p I am highly sceptical.

  14. Unfortunately for AMD new free APIs do not make money, new cards do. They decided to spend a tonne of their R&D budget on technologies that offer no financial return and in place rebrand every single card of this generation bar the Furys and the 380X.

  15. You can’t be gaming at 60FPS@4k, with a 970, though.

  16. Which is why I have two. VRAM doesn’t accumulate, any number in sli still has the same amount of vram and bandwidth as one

  17. Ahhh, yeah makes sense.

    Still, though, my GTX980 can struggle on new games at 1080p with everything cranked up. It’s why I wonder how nvidia get away with suggesting a 970 for 1080p and a GTX980Ti for 1440p. My friend has the Ti and can just about comfortably play 1080p maxed out.

  18. That matches neither my experience, any benchmarks that I have seen, nor the market placement of nvidia. I think your friend should turn the AA down a notch. It stops having impact above 4x anyway.

  19. Benchmarks don’t really mean anything, though. The Ti is a great card, but it still won’t max out everything

  20. Define “max out”. Are you picky about AA? How many samples do you consider “maxing out”? 4? 8? 16? Last I checked (which was five years ago, to be fair) the driver allowed up to 64x CSAA.

    Benchmarks “don’t really mean anything” for the opposite reason. They are not about playing the game, they are about stressing the card. It’s rare for me to see a 4K benchmark with anything less than 4x MSAA just to create arbitrary differentiation, when in reality you will get a 20 fps boost across the board by disabling AA and you will barely see the difference on reasonable-sized displays.

    I am of a mind where I like it when games have the ability to scale up with hardware above and beyond current technology, but also don’t require a GTX 780 and a Haswell i7 to even run. That is the difference between a demanding game, and an unoptimised game. Don’t even get me started on putting in checks for your processor and just not running unless you fulfil arbitrary core counts. From my point of view a well optimised game should be playable at 4K on a 980 Ti, yet also difficult to max out at 1080p, due to scaling.

    I think this is where the myth that 4K is particularly difficult to run comes from. Casuals just run the game, put all the sliders to ultra, don’t really know what any of them mean and just expect it to run; and then complain that they can’t play it with TressFX and 16x MSAA. This gets conflated with people complaining with a game like GTA IV, getting 40 fps on (then) modern hardware while still looking like arse, which *is* a valid criticism.

  21. Max shadows, textures and detail. I usually hit FXAA. I enable all the vendor specific features if possible. GTX980 still won’t “max” new games like that, which is a shame and is what makes me doubt it’s potential for 2k upwards. I have a i7-6700k under watercooling at 4.8GHz, too, so I”m guessing CPU isn’t a bottleneck on my machine.

  22. I never use FXAA. I prefer aliasing to a screen smeared in Vaseline. Textures also shouldn’t affect the gpu, they use vram. Imo a game filling 4gb at 1080p is either terribly unoptimised and will therefore likely have other issues besides the frame buffer, or is more detailed than a monitor of that resolution can realistically reproduce, so I’m not really fussed there.

    As for the others, if you’re having to turn the occasional setting down to Very High and it is because the game genuinely scales to take advantage of future hardware I’m not going to scorn that

  23. FXAA is fine (though I’ll up this where possible if course), and some games will try to use all the VRAM it can, because it’s fast. Or could be either it’s unoptimised, or the opposite.

  24. and for a little bit more you can get the gtx 980 ti, or even now you can get the 1080 (although the card was not out when you made the comment) What I’m trying to say is that the best price for performance cards are almost always the higher end cards. When people buy mid range or budget cards it’s because they don’t want to spent 600+ dollars on a graphics card.

  25. “the best price for performance cards are almost always the higher end cards”
    Although I dont agree that this is always the case, bringing the RX480 that will be out soon as an example, the point I wanted to make with my first comment was not that people should save money and buy more expensive cards

    Every one has a bugdet in mind, and they build around it. Yeah if its a mid-range budget they wont get the best performance available, but thats okay. What I was trying to say is that they should aim for the best performance for the money they will spend. There are many cards for every pricepoint from both companies and from multiple generations of cards, and one or two of these cards has to be the price-to-performance winner. But at the end of the day people still argue between all of them and pick their cards with a not so objective view on the matter

  26. I agree. Lets be friends ^-^

  27. ahahahah….sure 😉

  28. it seems the internet has decided i shall not find out anything about you with your permission, my departure from this venture will be swift and with good intent.