Five years can feel like a lifetime in the rapidly advancing world of tech, but running on dinosaur hardware doesn’t seem to bother the majority of users on the world’s most popular PC game distribution service one bit. As spotted on Steam’s hardware and software survey by a variety of outlets, NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1060, a graphics card that was released in 2016—a magical time when enthusiasts didn’t have to spend over a thousand bucks for flagship performance—still ranks as the most popular card despite numerous, more powerful successors that include the modern GeForce RTX 30 Series. There have been at least a handful of GeForce GTX 1060 models released over the years, all of which are based on the Pascal architecture.
The GeForce GTX 1060 is still the most popular GPU in Steam’s latest hardware survey (PC Gamer)
- The GTX 1060 was launched in August 2016 at $249. Imagine if the RTX 3060 was priced at $249! Even today the 1060 6GB holds up.
- The survey shows just how prevalent entry level and mid-range cards are in the market. Nvidia’s xx50 and xx60 cards occupy all of the top spots.
- AMD has some work to do. If we ignore integrated graphics, AMD’s first entry in the list is the Radeon RX 580 back in 17th spot.