Steam Survey Update: It's All About Quad-cores, NVIDIA and Windows 10

[efikkan]

These results have to be taking with a grain of salt but its interesting to see none the less.

AMD CPU's have been selling like hot cakes but are not getting used for gaming obviously or the results would be different I would imagine since sales have gone up like 25%

AMD GPU's well there sold out everywhere! and again not for gaming as we all know and people are having a hard time getting a AMD card for gaming so again the results dont reflect that.

OS well again it shows what? how many people actually use or have steam installed which is like less then 30% of all users? and W7 is still the most used OS over W10, again these results dont reflect that.

In the gaming world yep cool thats great, in the none gaming world its the complete opposite.

The Steam Survey is accurate for gamers, but not computers as a whole. AMD sells a lot of low-end OEM cards, these end up in PCs which are unlikely to do gaming in Steam.

 

[kruk]

I'm not even bashing

You were attacking Nicklas.

i5s are perfectly fine for gaming and will be for a good while more. Even i3s are just fine.

They are fine in benchmarks where the system is running two applications: the game and a FPS monitoring program, but this is not a reflection of real world use cases. You run a antivirus, firewall, have a open browser, play music, use Teamspeak, record gameplay, maybe use torrent program and all the background activity from them will make games stutter. I said enough in this thread and I'm moving out ...

 

[Toothless]

You were attacking Nicklas.



They are fine in benchmarks where the system is running two applications: the game and a FPS monitoring program, but this is not a reflection of real world use cases. You run a antivirus, firewall, have a open browser, play music, use Teamspeak, record gameplay, maybe use torrent program and all the background activity from them will make games stutter. I said enough in this thread and I'm moving out ...

I mean, my laptop will run a game, video recording, Chrome tab (usually YT or Pandora) and Discord all at once with no issues, and it's a little 1.5ghz quad 3420m. You underestimate quad cored chips but okay, stay on your 4c/8t chip and off ye go.

 

[Manu_PT]

I mean, my laptop will run a game, video recording, Chrome tab (usually YT or Pandora) and Discord all at once with no issues, and it's a little 1.5ghz quad 3420m. You underestimate quad cored chips but okay, stay on your 4c/8t chip and off ye go.

Everyone "needs" 6+ core CPUs since Ryzen launched. Prior to that anyone getting an i7 (4+4) for gaming was a complete moron, "i5 all the way, all you need. Even a Pentium G4560 is good on a low budget brah".

 

[Toothless]

Everyone "needs" 6+ core CPUs since Ryzen launched. Prior to that anyone getting an i7 (4+4) for gaming was a complete moron, "i5 all the way, all you need. Even a Pentium G4560 is good on a low budget brah".

Cept' that G4560 can run so many things and run loads of goodies.

 

[Manu_PT]

It does indeed. Now imagine a quad-core. But no, you need a 6 core.

 

[jboydgolfer]

Everyone "needs" 6+ core CPUs since Ryzen launched. Prior to that anyone getting an i7 (4+4) for gaming was a complete moron, "i5 all the way, all you need. Even a Pentium G4560 is good on a low budget brah".

who are you to claim people are or arent morons based on purchases they make?? id say it was FAR more reasonable to claim people are morons based on What they say, over what they buy.

 

[rtwjunkie]

You were attacking Nicklas.



They are fine in benchmarks where the system is running two applications: the game and a FPS monitoring program, but this is not a reflection of real world use cases. You run a antivirus, firewall, have a open browser, play music, use Teamspeak, record gameplay, maybe use torrent program and all the background activity from them will make games stutter. I said enough in this thread and I'm moving out ...

Toothless attacked no one. He merely said 6 cores was not necessary for gaming. If disagreement is an attack, no wonder so many people go apeshit on here lately. The lack of debate skills being taught in schools in the last 20 years is alarming.

You are really suffering from misplaced information. Many on here, including me, are either running primary or secondary systems for gaming with regularity that have only 4 cores, or, (gulp), i3's with HT. Without issue or stutter.

For non-gaming sure, a lot of uses will slow down with an i3 or i5, but not gaming. To claim a need for 6 core CPU's for gaming is merely for epeen/ maybe overcompensating for RL?

 

[Manu_PT]

who are you to claim people are or arent morons based on purchases they make?? id say it was FAR more reasonable to claim people are morons based on What they say, over what they buy.

Where did I call someone "moron"? I was being ironic, not my fault yo didn´t get it. was trying to say that prior to Ryzen launch, everyone would recomend an i5 for gaming because "i7 was unecessary". Now everyone "needs a 6 core AMD chip". Hope is clear now....

Meanwhile, most watched games on Twitch. They all need beefy GPUs and 6 core CPUs to run at 60fps. A 300€ 4 year Desktop/laptop can run this stuff with ease. So I guess is not a surprise if steam tell us GT730m gt940, gtx650, intel hd5000 are on the most used GPUs. These games are the"PC gaming", this is where all the PC gaming money/revenue/userbase is at. It isn´t on some random Ubisoft/EA crappy console AAA port wich you can run with a GTX1080ti at 4k and ultra eye-candy settings, after paying thousands to get dat "master race experience" by applying brute force on console assets (and always bad optimized for pc). That type of experience is not only crazy expensive, but it is used by a NICHE. Keep that in mind.

 

[EarthDog]

Cept' that G4560 can run so many things and run loads of goodies.

Yep. And in some, titles, not a majority but enough to make it a worthwhile mention, you can also pay a fps penalty for it as well...sometimes not much sometimes significant.

Source: techspot reviews here is bf1
https://www.techspot.com/amp/review/1267-battlefield-1-benchmarks/page4.html

I wouldnt go less than a quad for gaming if i could help it. If not, you do what you need to do.

 

[trparky]

It's not cores that games need today, it's high clock speed. A lot of games are still very much single-threaded beasts (or at least limited to a couple of threads) and will be for quite some time. Do you really think that games that have been made today (or last year) will magically become more core aware? Not a chance, it would require a complete game engine overhaul and there's no way in hell that the game maker is going to go back and do that to an older while at the same time potentially making the game unstable and performance lower on lesser hardware. Yes, newer games will take advantage of more cores (there's no doubt about that) but as for the current crop of games, that's not going to happen and as for those games higher clock speed is what really matters and not core count.

I've been told I have been wrong about Ryzen IPC deficits and I accept that I was wrong. What Ryzen needs to really beat Intel is higher clock speeds. Being stuck at below 4 GHz while Intel CPUs are clocking as high as 4.5 GHz (even 4.8 GHz) is what's really hurting AMD Ryzen. If AMD can somehow pull a rabbit out of their hat next year and bump the clock speeds up into the 4.5 GHz range then it will be able to truly go toe-to-toe with Intel's latest offerings.

 

[EarthDog]

It is slower IPC... just not as kuch as you tended to dramatically state. Thats a problem with you.

7700k are very commonly found at 5ghz. So...yeah.

 

[trparky]

It is slower IPC... just not as kuch as you tend led to dramatically state. Thats a problem with you.

Yeah... OK, AMD Ryzen IPC is slightly lower than Intel IPC but is it really enough to talk about? Scream, rant, and rave about? Nope.

7700k are very commonly found at 5ghz. So...yeah.

And like I said, meanwhile AMD Ryzen is sputtering along at speeds lower than 4 GHz and even if you do manage to overclock it many hit the 4 GHz internal throttling wall. Which just reinforces my idea that AMD needs to find a way to clock Ryzen higher into the 4.5 GHz range.

 

[kruk]

Toothless attacked no one. He merely said 6 cores was not necessary for gaming. If disagreement is an attack, no wonder so many people go apeshit on here lately. The lack of debate skills being taught in schools in the last 20 years is alarming.

Yeah no, don't even start with the disagreement high horse bs.

You are really suffering from misplaced information. Many on here, including me, are either running primary or secondary systems for gaming with regularity that have only 4 cores, or, (gulp), i3's with HT. Without issue or stutter.

If you can run something and you think it's smooth, that doesn't mean it's smooth for everyone. Frametimes tell the full story and are a objective way to measure performance. You can lookup some DigitalFoundry frametime videos where they compare different tier CPUs (or ignore the facts for foreseeable future, I don't care).

For non-gaming sure, a lot of uses will slow down with an i3 or i5, but not gaming. To claim a need for 6 core CPU's for gaming is merely for epeen/ maybe overcompensating for RL?

You are turning words around. We come from a "the System is a lot more smooth overall with 6 cores" to "6 cores are minimum for gaming." Thanks a lot!

 

[EarthDog]

Yeah... OK, AMD Ryzen IPC is slightly lower than Intel IPC but is it really enough to talk about? Scream, rant, and rave about? Nope.


And like I said, meanwhile AMD Ryzen is sputtering along at speeds lower than 4 GHz and even if you do manage to overclock it many hit the 4 GHz internal throttling wall. Which just reinforces my idea that AMD needs to find a way to clock Ryzen higher into the 4.5 GHz range.

lol, the irony here from someone who was essentially ranting about it previously....

Anyway, it's enough to mention, the IPC deficit, sure!

Whats an internal throttling wall? It typically hits a thermal wall, right?

Re 5ghz.. just updating your statement.

 

[efikkan]

I've been told I have been wrong about Ryzen IPC deficits and I accept that I was wrong. What Ryzen needs to really beat Intel is higher clock speeds. Being stuck at below 4 GHz while Intel CPUs are clocking as high as 4.5 GHz (even 4.8 GHz) is what's really hurting AMD Ryzen. If AMD can somehow pull a rabbit out of their hat next year and bump the clock speeds up into the 4.5 GHz range then it will be able to truly go toe-to-toe with Intel's latest offerings.

No, AMD needs to improve their performance by designing a comparable prefetcher. Intel certainly have much higher IPC, but IPC can also be a bit misleading, since some aspects of performance are not proportional to clock frequency. Especially when it comes to cache misses, the penalty is a time constant, so clock doesn't matter. This is why we see Ryzen struggle in gaming, while Kaby Lake gaming performance is usually flat from 4 GHz and up.

 

[trparky]

lol, the irony here from someone who was essentially ranting about it previously....

Anyway, it's enough to mention, the IPC deficit, sure!

I'm trying to admit that I was wrong about my many posts about Ryzen being bad a couple of weeks back. I was wrong and I'm admitting it!

Whats an internal throttling wall? It typically hits a thermal wall, right?

I have read some stuff that as you clock a Ryzen chip to 4 GHz it somehow hits a wall of sorts where no matter how high you clock it you reach a point of diminishing returns.

comparable prefetcher

I thought that was the whole point of their "AI-like" branch predictor. Are you saying that even with their recent branch predictor improvements that it's still not good enough?

 

[efikkan]

I thought that was the whole point of their "AI-like" branch predictor. Are you saying that even with their recent branch predictor improvements that it's still not good enough?

Their "AI" branch predictor is just a fancy PR name. The prefetcher is greatly improved over Bulldozer, but it's clearly far behind both Broadwell-E and Skylake/Kaby Lake. It's actually behind even Sandy Bridge, if we look at that part isolated. AMD needs to improve it a lot, including a larger instruction window, better branch prediction etc., possibly even more decode resources. AMD does have more computational resources (except AVX), which means if their front-end were good enough to saturate them, they could issue up to 50% more instructions, scaling beyond the IPC of Intel. This is why we see select benchmarks where Ryzen scales very well, they are known to programmers as cache/branch optimized workloads, where others Ryzen really struggle.

 

[trparky]

Well then, here's to hoping that Ryzen v2.0 will be better in that regard. Meanwhile I'm going to sit back in my chair with my popcorn while using my overclocked Ivy Bridge Core i5 chip.

 

[EarthDog]

I'm trying to admit that I was wrong about my many posts about Ryzen being bad a couple of weeks back. I was wrong and I'm admitting it!


I have read some stuff that as you clock a Ryzen chip to 4 GHz it somehow hits a wall of sorts where no matter how high you clock it you reach a point of diminishing returns.


I thought that was the whole point of their "AI-like" branch predictor. Are you saying that even with their recent branch predictor improvements that it's still not good enough?

i know... just dont overcompensate.

 

[trparky]

i know... just dont overcompensate.

People have told me that I have a problem with that, to the point of pissing some people off. I gotta work on that.

 

[rtwjunkie]

You are turning words around. We come from a "the System is a lot more smooth overall with 6 cores" to "6 cores are minimum for gaming." Thanks a lot!

Except.....here we are in a Steam hardware survey thread, which makes the focus of what CPU you think you need and what works perfectly entirely about gaming. Imagine that.

 

[Melvis]

Sales measured in revenue have gone up 25%, but sales in units might have dropped, actually. So the fact that AMD share is decreasing among Steam users is not surprising.
BTW: it's almost certain that AMD CPU market share among gamers is much higher than among PC owners as a whole..

Im pretty sure you have to sell units to make money....and the AMD Ryzen 1600 is now the second highest sold CPU on Amazon, clearly there been sold very well, heck every Ryzen CPU is in the top ten most sold CPUs of the last 3months but its not reflecting in this graph and im guessing its because there not been used for gaming?

At this point there really is no point in buying an AMD GPU for gaming (maybe other than being very used to FreeSync), so again: drop is not surprising.
Just look how many AMD GPUs on this list are from 2012-2013 (HD7000-8000).
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/directx/
The oldest GPU in NVIDIA's top10 is a 750Ti from 2014.
The oldest GPU in their top20 is GTX660 - still younger than HD7800..

At this point you CANT buy a AMD GPU for gaming, its not that the cards arnt any good or anything its purely because you cant, there sold out everywhere for mining, ebay, all online stores, there just gone! and as shown in this thread the GTX 1060 is the most popular card in which means the AMD 570/580 perform around and are priced at would mean they would of had good gaming sales IF you could get one lol.

This is irrelevant. Putting mining aside, GPUs are made mostly for gaming, so Steam users can be considered fairly representative in this statistic. This is not true for OSes, obviously.
According to StatCounter, current W7's usage share is around 39%, W10 is fairly close at 31%. But you have to take into account that W7 still dominates in corporate environments.
It's not surprising that W10 is already dominant among Steam users.

This is just showing us that the 26% of Windows 10 users use steam on there PC's more compared to the 49% that use W7 and as you said use more so for corporate. Most gamers use up to date hardware for there modern titles and with MS forcing people to move towards W10 and not allowing users to use there older OS's with modern hardware this is pretty much a given. It would be a slightly different story if this wasnt the case, but most likely wouldnt of changed the out come to much.

https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0

 

[LiveOrDie]

I think it's just 4 cores. Everything else should fall into "other" category.

So i5 sales lol.

 

[notb]

Im pretty sure you have to sell units to make money....and the AMD Ryzen 1600 is now the second highest sold CPU on Amazon, clearly there been sold very well, heck every Ryzen CPU is in the top ten most sold CPUs of the last 3months but its not reflecting in this graph and im guessing its because there not been used for gaming?

But we're talking about market share. AMD's market share went up in value, but what about the prices? Half a year ago their best selling CPUs were under $100. Ryzen 1600 is $210 and Ryzen 7s are even more expensive.
Yet, we don't see AMD revenue from CPUs jumping by a factor of 2 (or more), so it would seem that they're not selling as many CPUs as they used to. Essentially, they're loosing the mass market of cheap CPUs, replacing it with a fairly rare high-end product.

At this point you CANT buy a AMD GPU for gaming, its not that the cards arnt any good or anything its purely because you cant, there sold out everywhere for mining, ebay, all online stores, there just gone! and as shown in this thread the GTX 1060 is the most popular card in which means the AMD 570/580 perform around and are priced at would mean they would of had good gaming sales IF you could get one lol.

AMD cards are available - they're just very expensive, so not a very sensible choice for gaming right now.