Monday, November 4th 2024
AMD Falling Behind: Radeon dGPUs Absent from Steam's Top 20
As we entered November, Valve just finished processing data for October in its monthly update of Steam Hardware and Software Survey, showcasing trend changes in the largest gaming community. And according to October data, AMD's discrete GPUs are not exactly in the best place. In the top 20 most commonly used GPUs, not a single discrete SKU was based on AMD. All of them included NVIDIA as their primary GPU choice. However, there is some change to AMD's entries, as the Radeon RX 580, which used to be the most popular AMD GPU, just got bested by the Radeon RX 6600 as the most common choice for AMD gamers. The AMD Radeon RX 6600 now holds 0.98% of the GPU market.
NVIDIA's situation paints a different picture, as the top 20 spots are all occupied by NVIDIA-powered gamers. The GeForce RTX 3060 remains the most popular GPU at 7.46% of the GPU market, but the number two spot is now held by the GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU at 5.61%. This is an interesting change since this NVIDIA GPU was in third place, right behind the regular GeForce RTX 4060 for desktops. However, laptop gamers are in abundance, and they are showing their strength, placing the desktop GeForce RTX 4060 in third place, recording 5.25% usage.
Source:
Steam Survey
NVIDIA's situation paints a different picture, as the top 20 spots are all occupied by NVIDIA-powered gamers. The GeForce RTX 3060 remains the most popular GPU at 7.46% of the GPU market, but the number two spot is now held by the GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU at 5.61%. This is an interesting change since this NVIDIA GPU was in third place, right behind the regular GeForce RTX 4060 for desktops. However, laptop gamers are in abundance, and they are showing their strength, placing the desktop GeForce RTX 4060 in third place, recording 5.25% usage.
222 Comments on AMD Falling Behind: Radeon dGPUs Absent from Steam's Top 20
Seriously, though. Making good products is one thing. AMD can do that, too. Being able to sell them is another.Not to mention that AMD has open source drivers that the Linux teams implement into the kernel. No Windows user can imagine the wonders of fully working 3D and other advanced display features on first boot.
Not to mention that AMD works closely together with said Linux teams and Valve to make Steam and Proton a better experience day by day, at least as far as I know. :)
Do… do you not realize that everything is connected in this space? The “non-gaming” segment is literally what fuels the development for what becomes the “gaming GPUs”. AMD even acknowledged it when they recently announced that RDNA and CDNA will be merged back into one arch. Gaming-only GPUs aren’t a thing. And having the pull in one segment directly translates to another.
No, from the historical perspective too. The moment GPUs became GPGPUs they died as simple “3D accelerators”. And that happened almost 20 years ago. Do you really think using GPUs for compute is a new thing with AI? It isn’t.
This is not "falling behind", this is a bloodbath, and an entirely self-inflicted one from AMD. Greed destroys companies, exhibit A.Never had that problem with an NVIDIA GPU.
For what it's worth i've been doing my part. I think i've helped 7 (8?) people upgrade their gaming PCs in the last year and they've all gone with Ryzen and RDNA3 on my recommendation. So far no complaints. I'm hoping the word will spread from there that if you don't really want Nvidia's "special sauce" and/or are on a budget, an AMD GPU will do you just fine.
This 2010 presentation from NV is actually a good overview:
www.nvidia.com/content/gtc-2010/pdfs/2275_gtc2010.pdfSmall TOP 100 company that overtook Intel and IBM by market cap a while ago, pls donut bully.
People still acting as if AMD is still the underdog of mid-10s is wild.
Prices also will not come down. They will only go up. Each new generation of GPUs costs vastly more to design and to make. That's the cost of progress. If you want prices to go down the only way to do that is for PC gamers to stop buying GPUs and demand we turn back graphics to well over a decade ago. That's the only way to stop price increases. That or move it all to the cloud and have gaming as a service fees for performance tiers. As PC gamers won't accept moving graphics back they have screamed at the top of their lungs they want 3000 buck or higher GPUs or gaming by streaming and that's what they are going to get.
AMD doesn't have an image problem. PC gamers have a PC gamer problem. Where everyone demands two things happen. First companies don't make money or go bankrupt costing people their jobs all for the sake of PC gamers. Second that other PC gamers all bolt to AMD so they can have cheap nvidia. AMD isn't the issue. Nvidia isn't the issue. Image isn't the issue. Pricing isn't the issue. The issue is and always has been PC gamers. Until PC gamers change the situation is not fixable. But as they won't admit that, they are getting what the deserve and are treated far too kindly as is.Nvidia told everyone this with the 8800 series and CUDA. If people missed it oh well but that's not changing.
Although If the most I could spend is $300, I'd really consider just saving for a Steam Deck.If AMD didn't have console sales to rely on they might cut costs, though they seem to be following Nvidia on pricing. IMO its a dumb move to make when AMD could price their cards much lower and sell even more, then again Nvidia could undercut AMD while still having massive profit margins.
I also would absolutely not mind reverting graphics progress in games since those were “good enough” looking like 15 years ago and some awesome and striking art-styles don’t even require much processing grunt. But the masses want their photo-realistic slop and they want it now, so that train left the station long ago.
FWIW cheap GPUs that work just fine do exist. They exist in the form of APUs and SOCs. AMD is very good at APUs and SOCs and dominates that market.
What about the 2018 inadequate disclosure of crypto mining information? Or the questions surrounding Nvidia, Cor Weave, and Magnetar Capital...
You see, all the fairy tail "a company who makes the best product succeeds" meritocracy stuff ends when a company reaches a certain size, and then they start engaging in "gamesmanship" or "gaming the system" and manipulating the system in ways it wasn't intended. Every company engages in it when they reach a certain size and Nvidia is no different. For example, this would be like a company just deciding to make it standard practice to habitually violate a regulation because it's more profitable to violate the law and pay the fine than it is to comply with the law. We saw this with Intel bribing OEMs to not use AMD products and we still see it now in technically legal though, I'd argue unethical, "joint development funds" where Intel basically gives OEMs a boat load of cash to "help develop products" like the r&d on a laptop model, but the end result is that only Intel products are allowed in the top laptop models.
Does anybody here HONESTLY think Nvidia isn't engaging in such things? That Nvidia doesn't or hasn't used "levarage", i.e. coercion to get what it wants from partners and competitors? Nobody is claiming Nvidia is "Sauron"...after all, Sauron was once a "good" Maiar and Jensen Haung has been evil since he left the womb, but anybody claiming "Nvidia did nothing wrong" is completely naive....the fact that they're extracting every last dime out of already stretched consumers while they make money hand over fist from enterprise customers is a perfect example of that....and their seeming refusal to give 16GB of VRAM in an affordable video card (my guess is so the useful life of these videocards will be much shorter....what's going to hang around longer, a 16GB 7900GRE or a 12GB 4070 Super? I feel bad for the 3070 owners with 8GBs...
Does anyone really want to see history repeated by AMD going back to trying to fully compete on a two-front war again?
And no, I have a perfectly adequate understanding of capitalism. I never said that NV actions were ETHICAL. But they were good business. The fact that AMD was unwilling or unable to mirror or counter them is on AMD.
Everything else in that wall of text is just standard boiler-plate AMD apologia that I am too tired and impatient to respond to. I have done so a thousand times and there is no point in it. Educating people as I have done in this thread previously is worth it, arguing with people trotting out moral/ethical and conspiracy based arguments is not.No, what I want is them to either do something worthwhile with the Radeon division or sell it to someone who will. I am tired of the wasted potential that we’ve witnessed since the acquisition. AMD is clearly interested in being a CPU company, they do it well nowadays. Seeing what was once a beloved and successful entity in the form of ATI being mismanaged is painful. Seeing terrible marketing and business decisions is painful. Them constantly flip-flopping on what they even want to do with the thing is… You get the idea. I am a “fan”, you could say, though I would prefer “supporter” or “enjoyer”, of AMD. Same for (in theory) Radeon. Just not them together as things stand.
Because, inflation and market situation aside, the costs of development and manufacturing are rising exponentially, not linearly. Especially for really big dense chips, which GPUs are. It isn’t a complete coincidence that the price increases are coinciding with lithography switching to ever more expensive and complex EUV machines. Of course, if market realities been different, the increases to MSRP might have been lower. But it would have crept up all the same regardless. NVidia isn’t exactly lying about their sky-high RnD costs and TSMC is not lying either about each new manufacturing step up being more and more expensive and time consuming.
Their CPUs are going the same way. Zen 1 through 3 were massive triumphant curbstomps, but then they released Zen 4 which is very much meh and expected the market to react the same way as it did to the previous generation, and surprise surprise the market didn't. And instead of taking proactive measures to fix this with Zen 5 (like, I dunno, making its IO not a steaming pile of shit) AMD just shrugged and decided to release "Zen 4 but a little bit faster" as Zen 5, and the market has responded with an even bigger meh, and AMD still doesn't understand why.
This isn't rocket science, this is business 101: add new features to drive new sales! But instead we have some clock speed bumps and bolted-on USB4 that should have been integrated into the previous generation Zen 4 CPU, but they contracted with ASmedia who is always late, so instead it's a discrete and thus more expensive chipset that also consumes CPU lanes, thus Zen 5 is actually worse off in terms of connectivity than its predecessor which is literally insane. Meanwhile its competitor Intel, despite going through some serious internal fuckery, is able to deliver a CPU with two integrated USB4 ports like it's nothing, which is how things should be. Like, Intel is on its fucking knees and it's still able to do a better job of IO than AMD who should be riding high, what does that tell you?
I dunno man; I've just about come to the conclusion that AMD actually wants to fail. Nothing else adequately explains its inability to capitalise on its successes and build momentum from them, or fight back from its failures. Regardless of how smart their engineers are, their management just seems perpetually clueless, and there never seems to be any attempt to fix this.This, so much this. Very few people, even so-called technology enthusiasts, seem to realise just how hard of a brick wall silicon lithography has hit. It used to be that every year or two we'd get a full node halving which means 4x the transistors for the same area, now we're lucky if we drop by a single nanometer. EUV is slower and smaller node sizes have inherently higher defect rates too... basically it's a perfect storm.
I hope consoles and Linux gaming (however small that market is) will keep Radeon going and urge AMD to get better. If anything, changing market strategy with RDNA 4 is a good thing, imo.