THEmonthly hardware survey used by PC gamers on Steam spoke! The GTX 1060 has just been dethroned by its little sister GTX 1650. The latter, released 3 years later, had the wind in its sails thanks to an aggressive price/performance ratio when it arrived (€159). It also strongly benefited from the shortage of GPUs since it was one of the rare chipsets available and allowing to play the games recently landed. More, because there is a BUT, this GPU is, according to tests published in the press or on sites like UserBenchmark, up to 30% less efficient than its predecessor GTX 1060 and barely faster than a 1050 Ti.
Back to square one for PCs
This is therefore “bad news” since many developers rely on hardware evolution to bring the graphic quality of their game to the market. With 6,05% market share on Steam, the GTX 1650 is ahead of the GTX 1060 (5,58%) and the 1050 Ti (4,45%), former queens of the ranking. Entry-level and mid-range RTX GPUs only make up around 10%, where multiple AMD and Intel card references seem to scatter like crumbs.
Recall that Steam has more than a billion registered users for approximately 100 million active each month. The peaks of players connected simultaneously are of the order of 30 million. In short, the Steam hardware survey is now to be taken seriously and reflects a constantly evolving market. It also shows that, ultimately, the race for power is not necessary to be able to play, and that cards such as the GTX 1650 can be an alternative for those who want to have fun without breaking the bank (and without causing their EDF meter to soar ). It is also a starting choice at the present time to wait for the mass availability and at a good price of the next generation of GPUs, whether from nVidia, AMD or Intel.
In the meantime, the GTX 1650 is still displayed on merchant sites, like rueducommerce.fr which lists its first price for less than 200 euros.