PSA: Steam's hardware survey showed me something about ray tracing I never expected

I was just poking around the Steam hardware survey results from last month, and I saw that like 78% of gaming PCs still run on GTX cards or older. That means most people literally cannot use ray tracing at all, even if they wanted to. Meanwhile my PS5 handles it fine in games like Ratchet and Clank for a fraction of the PC cost. I guess I always assumed PC gamers were mostly on RTX cards by now, but nope, the data says otherwise. Has anyone else looked at those numbers and changed their mind about which platform is more accessible for new features?

2 comments

2 Comments

lily_schmidt536d ago

Wait, does that 78% include laptops too or is it just desktops? I feel like a lot of gaming laptops are still rocking older cards because people don't upgrade them as often. Plus those survey numbers always seem a bit skewed to me, like it only catches people who actually click through and agree to it, not the full userbase. I've got a buddy still on a GTX 1080 who swears he doesn't need RT because his games run fine, but he just hasn't seen anything that actually uses it well yet. I'd be curious if those numbers shift at all once more games force RT requirements like Indiana Jones or Alan Wake 2 did.

quinnbailey6d ago

Yeah I used to think the Steam survey was pretty accurate but you make a good point about the voluntary thing, probably misses a lot of casual users. And your friend on the 1080 is right, once RT is forced in more games you'll see those numbers climb quick.

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