It's that time of the month again when Valve releases its latest hardware survey statistics. All the key details about the various gaming PCs sampled are available for viewing, and while March's numbers don't include anything too significant, long-term trends show that most PC gamers upgrading from older GPUs are using Nvidia's latest RTX 40 series graphics cards, indicating that they are switching to Nvidia's newest RTX 40 series graphics cards.

This is of course not a bit surprising, as Nvidia has long dominated Valve's GPU charts. However, those expecting AMD's RX 7000 series to make some headway in this survey will be disappointed. The latest RDNA 3-equipped chips improved their survey share by only 0.1%, and their overall share is comparable to the 0.4% of RDNA 1 chips from four years ago.

AMD's last-generation chips still account for 3.1%, and a reasonable portion of that is the OLED version of the Steam Deck GPU, dubbed the AMD Custom GPU 0405, which accounts for 0.67% of the total GPU share in this survey. While this may not seem like much, it is AMD's fourth-highest entry on Valve's GPU list, with the Radeon RX 580 and many integrated GPUs coming before the Steam Deck.

As for Nvidia, the GeForce RTX 30 series forms the largest portion at 27.8%, with Nvidia graphics cards forming just under 72% of the total survey. Older GTX 10 series, RTX 20 series, and 16 series cards are gradually decreasing in numbers, and it was the latest Ada Lovelace products that filled their places.

Continuing the "oh, no surprise" theme, the most common products in the sample were mainstream and budget products: the GeForce RTX 3060 topped the list with 6.71%, followed by its predecessor, the RTX 2060 with 3.98%. The most common 40-series cards are the RTX 4060 and RTX 4070, at 2.5% and 2.42% respectively.

If you think there are no Megabucks cards at the top of the list, think again. The wallet-conquering RTX 4090 is in 30th place, while the RTX 4080 is two places below. [because there is no way to know how representative Valve's survey is of PC gaming as a whole, since there is no information on the survey methodology (e.g., sample size, geographic distribution, etc.).

Nevertheless, the industry does not completely ignore this and uses these numbers along with data from other companies to determine the potential user base for games. [Aside from graphics chips, 6-core CPUs and 8-core processors account for 34.8% and 19.8% of the total, respectively. Interestingly, 10-core CPUs are at 5.62%, followed closely by 12-, 14-, and 16-core chips, indicating that a small number of sampled PC gamers are using one of the latest CPUs from AMD or Intel.

In terms of system RAM, almost half of respondents have 16 GB, while 32 GB systems are up 2% from last month, reaching 29.3%. In another year, this number must be much closer to the 16GB figure, as more and more big games will require large amounts of RAM.

The same is true for monitors, with 1080p panels and 1440p taking the lion's share at 58% and just under 20%, respectively; 4K is only at about 3.4%, showing little sign of change.

Of note in the March figures is that the most commonly used OS language is Simplified Chinese at 33.4%, while English is at 32.5%.

As the months go by, given the sheer number of PC gamers in the country, Chinese will probably permanently be the number one language.