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
Valve uses the Survey results for it's own business purposes so they want gamers to participate. One sure way to make most gamers not want to participate is to nag the hell out of everyone every month. Can you imagine if Steam asked you to participate month after month, year after year? Of course a lot would just opt out but then we would be right back where we are now with a less than 100% database. The only way to get a more accurate database is to scan every gamers PC every month without their consent looking for changes in hardware. I don't think Steam would be that foolish and if they ever did then the Survey results would never be made available publicly again.
www.newegg.ca/sapphire-pulse-11323-02-20g-amd-radeon-rx-7900-xt-20gb-gddr6/p/N82E16814202431
Read some of these reviews and realize that the narrative is strong. It has changed from you can't trust Steam Charts to them being a reason to promote Nvidia. I mean it's like the Steam Deck or the Ally don't exist. Especially the Steam Deck that has been in the top 10 of Global Sales on Steam since release. The Doom and Gloom is so crazy in a world where the 7900XT is still $949 at it's lowest.
ir.amd.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1224/amd-reports-third-quarter-2024-financial-results
Also,the launch prices on their cards are just bad man. They need to do something about that.
1. Navi 22 GPUs are basically getting more and more advantage the higher the resolution goes. At 1080p, 6700 XT VS 7600 is almost a draw. At 4K, many games are still playable on 6700 XT and outright mess out on 7600.
2. There's not much discount you get buying a 7600.
3. Navi 33 isn't true RDNA3 and doesn't offer full +% IPC potential. Irrelevant for 99% audience, just a cherry on top.
In the current state of affairs, here in Russia at least, I'd recommend scraping for a Navi 21 GPU instead of getting anything Navi 22 because it's basically <100 USD difference and a lot more performance going on (6800 non-XT overclocks just fine if you're lucky). Unless, of course, you totally need something that only NVIDIA GPUs can do.
Talking from my 6700 XT experience here. Truly great hardware but AMD are driving me nuts with their driver pickiness and utter inability to stop copycatting, getting their stuff together and inventing something that DOESN'T WORK ON NVIDIA GPUS AND REALLY IMPROVES YOUR EXPERIENCE. FSR being hardware agnostic is cool but to actually compete, one needs to offer something the competition don't. And this something should be useful for average Joes, so some screenmaxxing übertechnology that only matters for quadruple displays owners doesn't produce much additional marketshare.
Edit: Why would they want to invent something that doesn't work on Nvidia? Being an asshole isn't the only way to win a race, and it's not in AMD's business politics, either. They're more about open-source, open standards, to which I'm infinitely more sympathetic than to Nvidia's proprietary scumbaggery.
When I built a new rig I instantly got the question, anyway.
I still don't quite believe its a realistic view on the market for gaming though. We have to appreciate the fact that gaming is tiered; there are types of gamers and therefore types of systems one can game on. Casual gamers might not get further than point and click and browser-type games, they can do that on IGPs. Other games simply won't run on them. Etc. Now consider the fact almost everyone games in some way shape or form and suddenly the Steam Survey looks a lot more representative - but not representative of the actual gaming market that we tend to think of when we think of gaming.
And I didn't even begin with AI/CUDA. And I won't. Do these +10% FPS per $ at pure raster with no upscaling matter? Of course. Do they matter THIS much? Not really.
He's right, AMD's RT is almost two generations behind nvidia now, and FSR is just awful. Full of blurry text ad almost hallucinogenic color mixing at times. DLSS balanced has better image quality then FSR ultra quality does. It's just fact.
How about this: if AMD wants to make an open source DLSS, make it good?
Of course, from the end customer's perspective, I want everything to strive on whatever hardware and said hardware to only compete in performance per $ and performance per watt but it's beyond impossible: this market has been totally monopolised about five or six years ago at this point. RDNA4 is to change absolutely nothing no matter how efficient and great this architecture proves to be. AMD are late. Dead man late.
Just as an example. You're rading too deep into it. There is no "narrative". Some people have always trusted the steam survey, othes have never believed it, and some are skeptical. A tale as old as time.
If I go back to threads from 10 years ago about Steam survey results, guarantee the conversation is nearly identical to today. This ignores history. Evergreen brought AMD to a 49% market share. When AMD was consistent with releases and maintained roughly nvidia performance every generation, they had no trouble selling. So long as they keep doing this wishy washy "oh were high end now were not now we are" thing they'll struggle to sell, because that does not inspire confidence.
I'm not sure what media you were reading, the ones I read lambasted intel for the poor showing and the 200 series basically being 14th gen but slightly slower.
At the same time, you don't get an AMD logo when you fire up a console running their hardware.
Its so silly I can't even begin to understand if or why AMD even has a marketing and PR department. Its as if they themselves don't even know what their brand strategy is. Apparently its some strange combination of 'playing underdog' 'being the revolution' 'evolving gaming' and 'undercutting the competition with free game bundles' while first telling us they're 'not focusing on RT until it hits the midrange' and then when it has hit the midrange for a full gen and half, they pivot over to abandoning the high end altogether :D It also ties in with @AusWolf 's earlier point about trying to play the premium graphics price strategy with RDNA. Like... what the fuck? Your featureset doesn't even match, idiots.
Help me understand the madness lol
AMD's lack of RT performance doesn't matter much when even Nvidia's RT performance is abysmal on anything less than a 4080. I'm not sad that I can't RT on my 6750 XT because I couldn't on a 3070 either. Whether or not RT is really such a significant and meaningful visual upgrade that makes it worth spending more is a separate debate, but I'm personally doubtful.
I don't care what anyone says, DLSS, FSR and XeSS are tools to get better performance out of ageing or lower end hardware when even low quality graphics options won't do anymore, nothing more. And that is a sign for me that the need for a GPU upgrade is imminent.
I'm sick and tired of responding to the mindless "oooh RT, aaah DLSS" comments everywhere, so let's leave it at that, shall we?
While RT performance could improve, I'd rather have slightly worse image quality with FSR as FSR isn't platform locked onto AMD cards. And if the TPU poll is anything to go by, gamers don't care that much about RT vs. pricing. I personally could care less about what graphics feature a game has, I buy games for the gameplay. So you want them to stop improving and stop competing altogether, also AMD only markets RT for a few games, I definitely don't see them constantly pushing the RT marketing.
I don't like what AMD does with launch pricing either when they they could decrease prices a bit and maybe sell more, then again AMD can't win a price war against Nvidia. And you can thank Nvidia for setting the bar high on prices, thats how competition works when Nvidia has 88% of the market.
And AMD was in on it since Microsoft launched the DX12 Ultimate label. They just forgot to build the right acceleration for it. This is a typical case of AMD say but don't do, or put differently, AMD being godawfully slow implementing features, as usual.
Nvidia was faster. The only reason Nvidia can keep creating proprietary features is because they simply pay off, and part of the reason they're paying off, is because AMD is always in wait and see mode.
Of course I'd be happy to point blank game devs who make games an unplayable mess if you don't turn these things on or if you don't get yourself a severely overclocked 4090 and graphics ain't next-gen but implemented right, these tools are great and not to be abolished.
NVIDIA developed DLSS in-house and continually invest in materially improving it. They, and card manufacturers, stick the DLSS label everywhere they can. It's in pretty much every one of their press releases. The narrative is "DLSS is good, we're proud of it, it's a feature you will enjoy, and you should use it". It's a killer feature, it's marketed as such, and people buy into it.
AMD developed FSR and open-sourced it, AKA threw it out into the world with the hope that they'd get magic open-source fairies to make it great. Except we live in a society where developers aren't fairies and they need to earn money to eat, and also they're not particularly inclined to give their time for for free for something that AMD will financially benefit from. So FSR gets basically no love, it's essentially an afterthought, every now and then AMD releases a new version and promptly never mentions it again, almost like they're ashamed of it and don't actually want people to use it. FSR could have been a killer feature if AMD had ever given a shit about making it such, but they never have and probably never will, because they just don't seem to understand the need for killer features. Now imagine if AMD's own management understood this. Yet they continually try to, and continually lose, and then instead of asking themselves "this doesn't seem to be working, maybe we should try something else?" they do the exact same thing and fail again. The definition of insanity... Because AMD's pricing has been so much lower :rolleyes: