Monday, April 8th 2019
Steam Hardware Survey Shows AMD's Continued Struggle to Gain Market Share
Steam's latest hardware survey has been released, and while there is no real head scratching changes, it does continue to give us a glimpse into current market trends. In regards to CPU adoption, both six-core and eight-core processors now account for 12.2% and 2.2% respectively. Looking at just Windows data shows six-core processors gained a bit over 2% market share in 3 months. Meanwhile, eight-core offerings saw a market share increase of roughly 0.5%. Speaking of processors, Intel still dominates the market capturing an 82% share. AMD, while competitive in many tasks besides gaming still only has an 18% share. Looking at the data would lead one to believe AMD is gaining back market share; however looking at previous hardware surveys their current share is mostly holding steady. Considering Intel still offers better gaming performance for the time being its unlikely AMD will make any real gains in the Steam hardware survey until gaming performance reaches true parity.
Looking at graphics cards, NVIDIA still reigns supreme holding the same 75% market share they have been clutching for quite some time. AMD, on the other hand, continues to struggle, holding a paltry 15% share with Intel and their integrated graphics still managing to hold a 10% share. Considering AMD's only release as of late was the Radeon VII it is not all that surprising to see no change here. That said, NVIDIA's dominance is indeed not a good thing as it means competition is minimal, and pricing is likely to remain high. Right now according to the Steam hardware survey, NVIDIA currently holds the first 12 spots in regards to today's most popular graphics cards, which combine for a 52.8% share. The most popular of these being the GTX 1060. You have to go all the way down to 13th place to find an AMD graphics card which just so happens to be the Radeon RX 580 with its 1.1% share. To find the next AMD graphics card you have to go all the way down to 19th where the companies Radeon R7 Graphics holds steady at 0.87%. Hopefully, AMD's upcoming Navi graphics architecture can bring them back to prominence and drive more competition.
Source:
Steam Hardware Survey
Looking at graphics cards, NVIDIA still reigns supreme holding the same 75% market share they have been clutching for quite some time. AMD, on the other hand, continues to struggle, holding a paltry 15% share with Intel and their integrated graphics still managing to hold a 10% share. Considering AMD's only release as of late was the Radeon VII it is not all that surprising to see no change here. That said, NVIDIA's dominance is indeed not a good thing as it means competition is minimal, and pricing is likely to remain high. Right now according to the Steam hardware survey, NVIDIA currently holds the first 12 spots in regards to today's most popular graphics cards, which combine for a 52.8% share. The most popular of these being the GTX 1060. You have to go all the way down to 13th place to find an AMD graphics card which just so happens to be the Radeon RX 580 with its 1.1% share. To find the next AMD graphics card you have to go all the way down to 19th where the companies Radeon R7 Graphics holds steady at 0.87%. Hopefully, AMD's upcoming Navi graphics architecture can bring them back to prominence and drive more competition.
91 Comments on Steam Hardware Survey Shows AMD's Continued Struggle to Gain Market Share
Unfortunately in the recent times most of the games I play are not on Steam anymore. :(
Battlefield I and Battlefield V, COD Black Ops 4, Far Cry New Dawn, Division 2, Metro Exodus
For Metro, I did not pre-order and have to use Epic now.
As big titles are moving away from steam, I wonder how good Steam is nowdays as indicator of market share.
It would be nice if EA, Uplay, Epic and Blizzard will also provide their data on CPU and GPU market share.
I mean: even the most fanatic AMD followers on this forum use arguments like "you only need a bit of tweaking to make Vega great" etc.Yeah. Discredit a user group as representative for the whole population, because it doesn't use as many AMD cards as you'd like. Perfect.
Steam is the most popular game distribution platform, with the largest choice of latest games (I'm not sure if GOG isn't beating them in totals). And gamers aren't exclusive.
So it's very likely that even if one spends the most time playing Blizzard games (often true), he'll also have Steam.
This makes Steam the best source for hardware popularity among users.
If we calculated some weighted statistics, for example games owned or hours played, the result could look differently.
We can safely assume that in the Windows part of the market AMD cards are usually bought for gaming, i.e. Radeon owners may be more avid gamers.
Nvidia cards are bought for other tasks as well, gaming being less important for the buyers (i.e. it's occasional). Nvidia GPUs are more common in ultrabooks / business laptops as well.
I said "Windows part" because there's also that 3% Mac users who may or may not game and are almost sure not to have an Nvidia GPU at the moment.Actually the majority of PC users simply don't know who AMD is (neither in the GPU nor CPU space). And AMD is the only party to blame. End of story.
Many non-gamers don't know Nvidia as well. I'm pretty sure my mom doesn't.
I have two gaming computers at home.
The machine I am using is based on all AMD. This is the first machine in a long time that has AMD processor in it.
The machine I built for my Son has Intel i7700k and Nvidia GTX 1070TI in it.
I own also gaming laptop that has Intel and Nvidia hardware in it which is now a few years old.
With Blizzard I was reffering to COD.
I don't play other games from them. I am not fan of those other games from them.
If you want to spend 100-200$ more just to bind all your future GPU to be exclusively nVidia or you lose the feature you paid good money for, go for it!
That is true when you use an RTX 2080 or 2080 Ti on FHD. In any other scenarios, you get ZERO performance gain from an Intel. How many use 2080 or 2080 Ti for FHD? LOL
What you're seeing here is a slice of PC gaming industry that tends to lean towards the casual side. And even here you see a better growth for high-end GPUs. A hardware survey on Origin or Uplay will return a greater percentage of those, along with a greater percentage of GTX 1060 equivalents.
I think we shouldn't overestimate AMD's Ryzen success. Its not like everyone jumped on it, because let's face it, for most tasks, most CPUs do fine and Zen isn't quite as mobile so you won't see much in laptops yet, which is the larger share of PCs for consumers. Also, stronger gaming APUs like the 2200/2400G are nowhere in the list...
Shipments is a better number to go by where RTX launch clearly did some damage to AMD:
www.jonpeddie.com/press-releases/jon-peddie-research-releases-its-q4-2018-add-in-board-report
This is why EGS exclusives are so attractive: they're literally different player bases. They figure they can tap the EGS crowd then swing around later to pick up the Steam crowd later. Win-win, consumers just need some patience. On the plus side, when it does get to Steam, it should be a much more polished game.
Maybe AMD should sell GPUs to cybercafes at a discount? Imagine the enormous PR gains from Steam statistics. ;-)There's no dependency between owning something and being a fanboy. They may be correlated at best. So you may be a fanboy that - for whatever reason - owns products from a company you hate. You're still a fanboy, just a very unhappy one.
Also, there's really no way I could check if you really own those Intel CPUs. There's also no way I could check if you really think what you write. Maybe you're quite normal and you act as you do for fun.
The only thing I know for sure is what I see in your posts.Or what they gained until now already almost saturated the potential for such CPUs and I'll soon stabilize.
BTW: I do believe AMD Zen naming is a mess and people will make mistakes, but would it be possible for staff members to be extra careful? You meant Zen 2 => Ryzen 3rd gen. Correct?
Zen archetucture name, Ryzen is a brand name under which AMD sells CPU.
Ryzen in future could have non Zen based cpu.
With less than 20% share, would you expect to see AMD cards dominating Steam survey? Well, that would be strange and doubtful, indeed.