Why is the NVIDIA RTX 3060 still the most popular GPU on Steam?

In February 2021, NVIDIA’s RTX 3060 hit the market for $329, then got tossed head-first into a fierce crypto boom that saw Nvidia ship it with a driver limiter that halved Ethereum mining speed. Now, almost six years later, it’s still the most popular GPU among PC gamers, at least according to Valve’s data. Steam’s October hardware survey saw the RTX 3060 share top spot with the RTX 5070, each used in 3.78 percent of surveyed PCs.

Thanks to the AI-driven memory shortage, the 3060’s successor cards sell far above Nvidia’s list prices, encouraging users to retain their older cards. But it’s not all bad: Its 12GB of memory (more than either of its direct successors shipped with) is still adequate for 1080p gaming, which is the most common resolution in the Steam survey.

The 3060 featured in 4.79 percent of surveyed systems in August 2025, according to the same survey, so while it still tops the popularity charts, it’s definitely leading a shrinking market overall. Valve also lists laptop chips separately, and combining the desktop RTX 4060’s 3.51 percent with the RTX 4060 Laptop GPU’s 3.60 percent 7.11 percent, nearly double the 3060.

Nvidia lists the RTX 5070 at $549, but median Newegg prices climbed from $659.99 in June to $899.99 in August, a 64 percent premium. RTX 50-series cards use the latest GDDR7 graphics memory, and with AI data centers swallowing up memory production, GPU supply looks like it’ll be limited for the foreseeable future. This keeps prices high and gamers on older cards.

NVIDIA also allegedly restarted production of the RTX 3060 12GB in June, almost two years after discontinuing the card in August 2024. That decision, while controversial, makes sense: The older card uses Samsung’s older 8nm process and GDDR6 memory, so it isn’t competing for access to the very limited supply of cutting-edge process nodes that more capable (AI) chips are fabricated on. Not that it looks to have helped much, though: While the revived RTX 3060 retained its original $339 launch price, most versions now sell for around $500 or more.

Despite all this, desktop graphics card shipments still hit 12.5 million in Q2 2026, the highest since early 2022, according to Jon Peddie Research. “Our theory is consumers rushed to buy AIBs before the prices went any higher,” said Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research, in the firm’s Q2 report. However, much of the growth was in the high-end market, and the mainstream upgrade a 3060 owner would normally make is now out of reach for most people — so they stick to what they have.

When it launched, the RTX 3060 had 12GB of GDDR6 on a 192-bit bus, more than the RTX 3070 or RTX 3080 that sat above it in the pecking order. The $299 RTX 4060, which replaced the 3060, cut that to 8GB on a 128-bit bus in 2023, which the RTX 5060 retained. Less VRAM limits how much texture data a game can load before it spills over into slower system RAM. When that happens, frame rates drop and stutter worsens. Thus, a graphics card’s VRAM allocation can matter as much as its raw speed.

Just over half of Steam users (50.23 percent) still game at 1920 x 1080, the resolution the 3060 was designed for, and for which 12GB is generally adequate. RTX 3060 owners can also use DLSS upscaling to improve frame rates at higher resolutions. However, DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution, which Nvidia released in January 2026, comes with a heavier performance cost on 20- and 30-series GPUs. So, while a 3060 owner (and even myself, a 2060 owner) still gets access to the newest upscaler, it comes with a heavier performance penalty on 40- or 50-series cards. DLSS 4, however, is fine.

At the end of the day, the only reason the 3060 tops Steam’s survey is because millions bought one at a sane price, and nothing NVIDIA has released since has been cheap enough to replace it at scale. When memory prices made its successors too expensive to sell at MSRP, NVIDIA’s answer was to bring back 2021’s RTX 3060 and sell more of them instead. Until GDDR supply catches up with AI demand, the most popular gaming GPUs on Steam will likely remain the older, more accessible cards.