At the end of January this year, Nvidia dropped its new RTX 40 Super Series GPUs. These came with some pretty impressive power boosts and a reasonable amount of excitement. While on paper they do a lot of things right, the timing of them just after the most expensive time of the year, combined with general financial turmoil, means that we didn’t think most would go for them straight away. According to the latest Steam Hardware Survey, that’s very much the case too.
According to the survey, a mere 0.16% of users have the RTX 4070 Super, which is a tiny fraction of the users, and perhaps more startling than that, neither the RTX 4070 Ti Super nor the RTX 4080 Super don’t even appear on the survey at all. While it’s likely that some people have upgraded to these cards, it would seem that the adoption rate is simply too low to be worth noting.
It seems that even the original RTX 40 Series isn’t all that popular either. The survey shows that only 12.3% of Steam users have gone for a 40 Series GPU, and that’s including 3.54% who are laptop users as well. It’s a little surprising to see so few people on the latest Nvidia GPUs given record sales in the last few years, but it’s likely linked to a few different things.
For starters, there was the global chip shortage which slowed down a lot of technology fairly substantially, at least when it comes to your average user actually picking up the latest and greatest PC parts. There’s also the matter of a lot of GPUs being bought up by bots and whatnot during the last few years for crypto farming, although that has thankfully become far less of an issue.
The final reason is one that we’re all suffering from, and that’s simply that things are really expensive now. For a lot of people, electric bills, rent, mortgages, food, and basically everything else, have become pricey in a way that’s putting a deeply uncomfortable squeeze on already squished disposable incomes. It means that spending a lot of money on a PC part is a big ask, and frankly, the leap between the 30 Series and 40 Series simply isn’t worth the expense for most users. It’s a stressful time, and while it’s nice to spend money on luxuries, a nice croissant is a lot more reasonable than a new GPU.
