4K gaming has been hailed as the future for years now, but a shockingly small amount of users have adopted it so far. At least, that's what the latest Steam Hardware Survey has to say.
Once per month, Steam conducts a monthly survey of a portion of the users on its platform to see the general state of the ecosystem. Last month's results have been released and they contain quite a few interesting facts, one of which is relevant to 4K gaming: less than 2% of Steam users are gaming in 4K.
Here is a selection of the resolutions players are using:
- 1024 x 768: 0.47% (-0.05%)
- 1280 x 1024: 1.64% (-0.01%)
- 1920 x 1080: 64.58% (+1.11%)
- 2560 x 1440: 4.95% (-0.06%)
- 3840 x 2160: 1.74% (-0.04%)
That's just the data for single-monitor users, mind. There is nearly as large of a percentage using two monitors for 4K gaming as well; 1.54% of multi-monitor people (Up 0.08%) are running 7680 x 2160 resolution. That said, there are almost certainly far fewer people using multi-monitor setups and almost 75% of those who use that setup have a total resolution of 3840 x 1080 - or two 1080p monitors.
4K Gaming Needs High-End Graphics (And Those are Rare)
Understandably, playing a game in 4K resolution requires a fair bit of graphical power if you want to maintain a decent framerate and level of graphics quality. The relatively small amount of people playing in 4K can most readily be explained by the graphics cards being used.
At the moment, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 is the most popular graphics card on Steam, holding 14.44% of the share. That's followed by the 1050 Ti at 9.66%, the 1060 at 5.39%, and the 1070 at 4.35%. The most popular AMD card is the RX 580, down at 1.54%. But what about the higher-end cards?
The RTX 2080 is way down the list with only 0.88% of users owning this card. And the number of people with the big bucks are even smaller — only 0.54% of users in last month's Steam Hardware Survey own an RTX 2080 Ti. 4K Gaming may well be the future, but it will be a long time before we see it reach the same level of mainstream popularity as 1080p.
What do you think of the current amount of people doing 4K gaming on Steam? When do you think it will surpass 1080p? Let us know in the comments below!
