Now that we’re shooting for Halloween, the Steam September numbers are in, and they show that PC gamers are slowly jumping on the Nvidia GeForce GTX 10 Series bandwagon. The increase in usage isn’t dramatic, and the new cards still have a way to go before they topple the GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 960 cards, which appear to be the most-used DirectX 12-compatible graphics cards in September.
Check out the progress the three GTX 10 Series cards have made since their debut:
| May | June | July | August | September | ||
| GTX 1080 | – | – | 0.42% | 0.68% | 0.88% | +0.20% |
| GTX 1070 | – | – | 0.47% | 0.98% | 1.42% | +0.44% |
| GTX 1060 | – | – | – | 0.34% | 0.90% | +0.56% |
As the chart shows, the GTX 1070 appears to be the big seller of the three, as the card costs around $380 compared to the $600 launch price of the GTX 1080. The trickling consumer adoption of the latter, more powerful card is likely due to its price tag, while the GTX 1060 didn’t have quite as robust an opening as its two siblings. Still, the GTX 1060 has managed to gain some momentum with its attractive $300 launch price for the 6GB model.
Based on the numbers, the GTX 1070 seems to hit a sweet spot between price and performance. It’s packed with 1,920 CUDA cores, a base clock speed of 1,506MHz, and a boost clock speed of 1,683MHz. Other ingredients include 8GB of GDDR5 video memory, a 256-bit memory interface, a 256GB/s memory bandwidth, and a memory clock speed of 8Gb/s. It only uses one 8-pin power connector.
What’s interesting about the Steam chart is that the GeForce GTX 970 is at the top of the DirectX 12 chart with a 7.13-percent usage in September, down 0.19 percent compared to August. Next in line is the GeForce GTX 960 with a 5.28-percent usage in September, down 0.09 percent from the previous month. What’s not on the list is AMD’s batch of Radeon RX 400 Series cards, unless they have a generic listing we’re not seeing. All three AMD cards launched throughout the summer targeting the mainstream consumer.
On the operating system front, Windows 10 64-bit rules the PC gaming world although the platform took a slight dip in September. What’s amusing here is that PC gamers are still using Windows XP 32-bit to run Steam games, with the platform at 1.55 percent in September and 1.63 percent in August. Meanwhile, Windows 7 64-bit and Windows 8.1 64-bit took a very slight usage jump in September.
| May | June | July | August | September | ||
| Windows 10 64-bit | 41.58% | 44.96% | 46.67% | 49.55% | 49.54% | -0.01% |
| Windows 7 64-bit | 33.79% | 32.05% | 31.37% | 30.02% | 30.38% | +0.36% |
| Windows 8.1 64-bit | 11.60% | 10.54% | 9.74% | 8.96% | 9.04% | +0.08% |
| Windows 7 | 7.10% | 6.66% | 6.58% | 6.18% | 6.00% | -0.18% |
| Windows XP 32-bit | 2.06% | 1.82% | 1.78% | 1.63% | 1.55% | -0.11% |
Finally, in September Steam saw that 59.8 percent of its VR-based gamers own the HTC Vive while the consumer version of the Oculus Rift resided at 30.22 percent and the Oculus Rift DK2 at 9.98 percent.
