Despite what Nvidia might want you to believe, not every PC gamer is cranking up ray tracing in their games and boosting their frame rates with DLSS. As a case in point, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 is currently the fifth most popular GPU on the latest Steam Survey, commanding a 3.21% share. This piqued my curiosity. Just how many other gamers are still in the non-AI, rasterisation-only camp? A lot, as it turns out.
To get an idea, I totted up the numbers in the latest Steam Survey. Just as a quick recap, GTX was Nvidia’s main GPU brand before RTX brought ray tracing hardware and dedicated AI Tensor cores to gaming, and there was a crossover period. When Nvidia released its first RTX 2000-series GPUs with the Turing architecture, it also released a range of super-cheap GTX GPUs based on the same core architecture, but without the ray tracing and Tensor cores – the aforementioned GTX 1650 was the cheapest one.
Meanwhile, AMD didn’t introduce hardware ray tracing cores until it released its RDNA 2 architecture over a year later, and didn’t have dedicated AI cores until RDNA 3. Of course, a lot of the GPUs listed on the Steam Survey are Intel integrated graphics systems. There’s also some ambiguity in a few of the Steam Survey listings, where, for example, AMD Radeon(TM) Graphics and Intel Iris Xe Graphics could technically refer to some chips with ray tracing hardware, and some without.
As such, I haven’t included these terms in my figures, so they’re a conservative representation if anything. Instead, I’ve added up the survey shares for all the GPUs that I know have no ray tracing or AI hardware. This includes all the Nvidia GTX and GT GPUs, all the pre-RDNA 2 AMD GPUs, and all the Intel GPUs that predate Iris Xe and Arc. The total comes to 21.22 per cent, and there are some surprising finds in there too.
For example, there are still several GPUs in the survey that are seriously old now, including the GeForce GTX 750 Ti – a GPU based on the ageing Maxwell architecture that came out at the start of 2014. It currently has a 0.22 per cent share on the Steam Survey, making it more popular than the AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT, 6800, and 6900 XT. A couple of GTX 900-series GPUs make the cut in the latest survey too – the GTX 970 and GTX 960. Meanwhile, not a single AMD RDNA 4 GPU, such as the Radeon RX 9070 XT, is listed, and the Pascal-based GTX 1060 is also still surprisingly popular with a 1.95 per cent share.
What’s really striking here, though, is that so many gamers are still using GPUs with no ray tracing or AI hardware. Nvidia released its first RTX GPU, the RTX 2080, over seven years ago now, with several GPU generations coming since, but over a fifth of gamers on the latest Steam Survey still haven’t been convinced of the benefits of ray tracing or DLSS.
Personally, I love ray tracing – it adds an amazing level of realism to your gaming experience, but then I’m all about single-player gaming with all the eye candy enabled. If my main objectives were playing Fortnite, Roblox or Minecraft, there’s not really a compelling reason to upgrade. That may change in the future, especially now that several games, such as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, now require ray tracing at the base level. Rignt now, though, there’s still a substantial portion of PC gamers with no ray tracing hardware at all.
