If you are a Steam user, the official will ask you when you sign up if you want to join the hardware research program. It is reported that Steam's hardware research plan will conduct a monthly survey of users to collect data on the types of computer software and hardware that users are using, so that developers can understand the user's hardware equipment level and provide a yardstick for subsequent game development. Today, this tradition has continued for more than a decade, giving us a glimpse into how players' hardware has changed since the PC Internet era.
A few days ago, the March 2022 Steam hardware survey results were released, and in this report, the proportion of 6-core CPUs exceeded that of 4-core CPUs for the first time. Of course, this is not the biggest highlight of this report, and what is really interesting is in the statistics of the graphics card. Since June 2017, Nvidia's GTX 1060 surpassed the previous generation of product GTX 970 to take the first place in the share of graphics cards, until March 2022, the GTX 1060, which accounted for 8.18%, was still the most used graphics card on Steam, and even accounted for a slight increase of 0.19% compared with the previous month.
In fact, as early as June 2017, GTX 1060 has reached 8.65% of the graphics cards used by Steam players, which is equivalent to saying that GTX 1060 has been the leader in this field for nearly 5 years, although it has undergone the baptism of RTX 20 series and RTX 30 series, it is still standing still.
Due to Steam's absolute leadership in the field of PC digital game distribution, the statistical survey data it publishes can obviously objectively show the level of hardware used by current gamers.
It's hard to imagine that a graphics card that went on sale in 2016 is still the most commonly used product for PC gamers around the world to this day. Although in the mobile phone circle, iPhone 6S and Xiaomi Mi 6 are called "nail households" because these old models have not been mainstream, and products like GTX 1060 that have been "crushing" new graphics cards in the past few years are rare. That's right, not just June 2017 and March 2022, but in fact, in the 58 months from June 2017 to the present, the GTX 1060 has always been the most popular graphics card for players on the Steam platform.
Different from the topic of "why young people are reluctant to change mobile phones", everyone agrees that in the past 4 years, the smart phone industry has entered a low tide of innovation after experiencing the peak of the concept of full screen, in the words of netizens, "Every time a new product is launched, it is just a small repair on the basis of the previous generation, and the difference in appearance is not big, either it is to do publicity on the screen, or to make an article on the color matching, so that people have no desire to buy after reading." ”
The situation in the graphics card market is obviously completely different, from the LAUNCH OF THE GTX 10 series using pascal architecture in 2016 to the current 2022, the performance improvement of game graphics cards can be described as quite powerful, and basically abide by Moore's Law. Even NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang excitedly said at the RTX 20 series conference that the Turing architecture is the biggest leap in the GPU field in the past 12 years.
But players have not shown enthusiasm for the RTX 20 and RTX 30 series, not because the graphics card upgrade is not large, but because the soaring price makes them prohibitive. Starting with the RTX 20 series, it is also a transition from GTX to RTX, where "R" stands for "Real-Time Ray Tracing", so the graphics card models prefixed with RTX are also equipped with RT Core units dedicated to ray tracing.
Although the birth of new technologies should have contributed to the replacement of old graphics cards by consumers, the RTX 20 series exposed a very serious "flower screen door" after listing, from the 10,000-yuan RTX 2080Ti to the entry-level RTX 2060 have been affected, this probability is extremely high, and the fatal defect that greatly affects the use of the RTX 20 series directly makes the RTX 20 series can be described as "the first to die before the master".
If the price increase of the RTX 20 series is due to the result of adding ray tracing technology, then to the RTX 30 series, due to the deepening of the risk aversion of global capital due to the epidemic, the virtual currency market that is considered a safe-haven asset has risen sharply, directly making the graphics card that can produce the main currency Ethereum (ETH), from the player's game hardware to "a chicken that lays golden eggs", making the graphics card from a consumer electronics product to a productivity tool, and it is a kind of money-making tool that has almost no threshold. At the best time of the virtual currency market, the purchase of an RTX 3080 with an original price of 5499 yuan can return the cost in less than half a year, and the ultra-high profit margin also makes the graphics card market become "crazy".
Many friends may recall that since the winter of 2020, a large number of non-gamer premium purchases have caused the graphics card price to start the triple jump. In addition, the epidemic's blow to the global semiconductor industry chain has led to insufficient production capacity, and the final result is that the RTX 20 and RTX 30 series have a premium of up to 50% or even 150%.
However, unlike daily necessities, graphics cards as consumer electronic products are to meet the needs of leisure and entertainment, not just needed, which determines that consumers often have an expectation for the price of graphics cards. In fact, whether on the PC side or the console side, the player's budget for hardware is actually anchored in a certain range, usually $399 on the host side, and the PC side is almost $249 graphics card with a $150 CPU.
At that time, the reason why PS3 sold badly in the early stage was that the price of $699 exceeded the range of most players, so that after Succeeding the "Father of PS" Kuta Yoshiki Ken as CEO of SIE, the first thing hirai kazuo did was to control the PS3 on a large scale and launch a thin version of the PS3 with a lower price. Similarly, the $60 price of AAA games has been maintained for decades, also because this price is a price that has been repeatedly tested by game developers and players, and both sides can accept it.
The reason why NVIDIA's "60" graphics card of each generation is selling well is because this model has balanced price and performance. Don't look at the short video platform is almost "standard i9 12900K + RTX 3080", but the players who really buy flagship graphics cards have always been a minority, and this is clear at a glance when you look at the sales of graphics cards in various grades on the e-commerce platform.
Of course, the premium is indeed a barrier to players updating their graphics cards, but in some cases, the premium cannot completely prevent players from updating. GtX 1060 is not only hot because of its obvious performance improvement, can be with the previous generation of sub-flagship GTX 980 "broken wrist", and even with the PS4 and Xbox One, the most critical reason is actually that half a year after the release of GTX 1060, an epoch-making game was released on Steam, that is, "PUBG: Battle Royale", and this phenomenon game is also the key to Steam's popularity in the domestic market. GTX 1060 was released in the summer of 2016, but in the six months after its listing, the dominant steam graphics card ranking is actually a generation of god cards GTX 750Ti and GTX 970, until June 2017, GTX 1060 directly from outside the top ten "airborne" to become the champion.
The most direct reason why players choose to jump from GTX 750Ti to GTX 1060 is that the latter can smoothly run PUBG: Battle Royale threshold at 1080P high quality. At the same time, the spring and summer of 2017 is also the digital currency mining tide for the first time into the vision of ordinary consumers, although there is also a certain premium in the price of graphics cards in this period, but due to the excellent performance of "PUBG: Battle Royale", a considerable number of players in order to be able to "eat chicken" smoothly, with a huge premium of more than 3,000 yuan also have to buy GTX 1060.
Unfortunately, however, PUBG: Battle Royale has never seen a game that has caused a global craze. Due to the excellent performance of GTX 1060 itself, it has always been able to experience AAA games in 1080P quality in the PS4 and Xbox One generations, coupled with the ultra-high premium of the new graphics card, so that players finally chose to give up updating the graphics card. GTX 10/20/30 in a sense should correspond to the three eras of 1080P, 2K, and 4K, but now the popularity of GTX 1060 means that the changes expected by Nvidia and AMD have failed, which is obviously not a good thing for the current game industry.
Over the past few decades, game quality has improved – players upgrade configurations – and hardware manufacturers develop higher performance graphics cards in the traditional gaming industry's software and hardware update system, which has now failed. A large number of players long-term holding GTX 1060 is not willing to update, which means that all game manufacturers will use the performance of this graphics card as a benchmark to adjust and optimize their products, try to achieve the lowest special effects can run smoothly on this graphics card, one after another, the marginal benefits of the game screen are getting lower and lower, the more players are reluctant to spend a lot of money to exchange for the upgrade of picture quality, and eventually lead to the development of the industry to stagnate.
Whose pot is the pot to ask? Maybe it's NVIDIA, which is in cahoots with miners and scalpers, or maybe it's a game manufacturer that lacks innovation, but it's clearly not a consumer problem.
【The picture of this article comes from the network】