Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4060 might be gradually winning over the hearts and minds of PC gamers, but there’s one GPU that sticks out like a particularly sore thumb in the latest Steam Survey. It’s not from the current Nvidia GPU generation, the one before it, or even the one before that. It’s the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060. This GPU has no ray tracing or AI hardware, and it came out in 2016, but it’s still the eighth most popular gaming GPU among Steam users. It not only has more users than the RTX 4070, but it’s also a great deal more popular than any AMD GPU, even now.
Even now, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 can still be sighted all over the place, despite being eight years old. It hasn’t been one of the best graphics card options for years, but you still see it regularly listed in the minimum system requirements for the latest games, simply because so many people use it.
The reason, I think, is down to one simple fact. The GTX 1060 was the last decent GPU to have a genuinely affordable price when it came out. It was sold in two versions – one with 6GB of VRAM, and a cheaper model with just 3GB of VRAM. At the time, 3GB was (just about) enough to still get decent performance in games at 1080p, and this 3GB card launched at just $199.
That’s 33% cheaper than the RTX 4060 MSRP, and it’s over 39% cheaper than the RTX 3060’s $329 launch price. Meanwhile, the RTX 2060 might have given you ray tracing cores and DLSS support, but it wasn’t massively quicker than the GTX 1060 in games without ray tracing enabled, and it only had 6GB of VRAM, much like the top GTX 1060 card.
If you owned a GTX 1060, the RTX 2060 would be unlikely to persuade you to upgrade, and the RTX 3060 launch was plagued by a silicon shortage and cryptocurrency boom, meaning it was practically impossible to find at its MSRP.
When the RTX 4060 came out at $299, and with no cheaper RTX 4050 model available, your upgrade options from a GTX 1060 still didn’t look that great. Even now, the only GPUs you can buy for under $200 are the weedy last-gen RTX 3050, and the Radeon RX 6500 XT, widely described as one of the worst GPUs ever.
Meanwhile, AMD’s standing in the current Steam Survey should be ringing alarm bells at the company. The first appearance of AMD is at number 16, but that’s just the generic AMD Radeon Graphics moniker used for its integrated GPUs. You have to drop all the way to number 32 to find a graphics card based on an AMD GPU, and that’s the similarly ancient Radeon RX 580. You have to scroll down to number 57 to find one of AMD’s current-gen desktop GPUs, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, with a 0.36% share (down 0.01% compared to last month).
What this shows to me is that both AMD and Nvidia have missed a trick with their most recent launches. Let’s remember that the $199 price of the GTX 1060 3GB wasn’t the cheapest at this time – the GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti, as well as the Radeon RX 570, were even cheaper. Years after the crypto boom and Covid pandemic, there still isn’t an equivalent of the GTX 1060 – a GPU that can play every game at 1080p with decent settings for under $200.
If the Radeon RX 7600 had cost $199, I think it would have cleaned up, rather than being nowhere to be found on the current Steam Survey. Its $269 price might be better than the originally mooted $299, but it’s still nowhere near cheap enough to become a massive mainstream hit. To make matters worse, there isn’t a cheaper GPU available in either AMD or Nvidia’s latest graphics card ranges.
CPUs are still keenly priced at the budget end, with the Ryzen 5 7600X currently going for just $197.80 on Amazon, and the Core i5 12400F costing just $109.99. Why can’t we have a proper sub-$200 gaming GPU again? Yes, there’s been inflation since then, but Nvidia’s profit margins are clearly enormous right now. If I could make one plea to Nvidia and AMD for their next-gen GPUs it’s this: please make a decent 1080p gaming GPU for a genuinely affordable price.
For more information about what could be coming with the next GPU range, check out our Nvidia RTX 5090 guide, where we run you through everything we know about the company’s next top-end chip. Let’s hope Nvidia’s new Blackwell range also includes a GPU cheaper that costs under $299.