NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 2060 is easily the most balanced RTX card out there. Selling at just $299, it offers a taste of ray-tracing to the masses. It also happens to be one of the few GeForce GPUs without any direct competition from the rival Radeon Team. The RX 5600 XT was supposed to be a solid mid-range Navi GPU, but given how the launch was handled, it has made many gamers wary.

The GeForce RTX 2060 gained a massive 0.53% market in March, making it the fifth most popular graphics card among Steam gamers, with a 2.71% share. It’s also the highest-ranked present-gen GPU, outranking even the GTX 1660 Ti. Seems like NVIDIA’s RTX call to gamers has actually worked.

The RTX 2070 follows shortly behind with a 2.1% market share, up from 1.68% in Feb. The highest-ranked Super GPU is the RTX 2070 Super with a 1.21% share. The RTX 2060 Super doesn’t seem to be doing all that well, pegged at just 0.75%. This most likely the result of better AMD Navi alternatives available at this price point, namely the Radeon RX 5700. Regardless, the 2070 Super is much more balanced product, offering markedly higher performance than its competitors, explaining its rapid gains in recent months.

Are Intel CPUs Gaining Ground?

Many outlets have been reporting that Intel has started gaining ground among the gaming crowd amidst the lockdown, but is this really true? Let’s have a look:

Right off the bat, we can see that Intel chips with base clocks in the 2.7GHz to 2.99GHz range have clearly been favored. The mainstream desktop chips which lie in the 3GHz+ spectrum continued to lose massively. So what does this mean?

Two reasons. First, the Core i5-9400F is the primary reason for Intel’s positive fortunes in the Steam community. It’s the only 9th Gen Coffee Lake CPU that doesn’t face a direct Zen 2 rival and is actually a decent, all-round midrange part. The 3600X clashes with the 3600X, the 3700X with the 9700K and the 3900X with the 9900K. It also has a base clock of 2.9GHz coinciding with the segment that gained the most.

Second, amid the lockdown, the number of Steam users has increased dramatically. As most of these folks are just people stuck at home, looking at a temporary respite from boredom, they probably pulled out their old machines to game. As Intel was the predominant chipmaker prior to Ryzen, most of these newcomers will be using Blue chips, further contributing to the company’s gains among Steam users in March.