AMD Falling Behind: Radeon dGPUs Absent from Steam's Top 20

[AusWolf]

It's closer to the experiences I've had with it - such as my friend that went through 7 5700 XT's before saying screw it and buying a 2070 Super, or my other friend that I regularly played games with that always dropped out of games because of BSODs, or the anecdotes of the numerous folks I've come to know over time. I've been following it pretty close.

Unfortunately, prices never really went significantly down to the point I would choose to take a risk - hopefully, there is a 6500 XT or 6600 at a very nice price this Black Friday. We'll see.

Even the 5700 XT is a different animal. I had an Asus Strix which overheated, threw BSODs and driver timeout errors, and was generally a bad card. I got rid of it during covid, turning a profit and getting a 2070 myself which I didn't regret.

Then my 6750 XT is an all-around great card. Stable as any Nvidia. Then I also had a 7800 XT at some point. Its initial drivers were a bit meh, but everything got fixed in a couple of months except for the massive video playback power consumption which is an architectural problem. Other than that, great card. I'd still have it if I didn't have to prioritise my finances for the summer holidays.

So see, all 3 RDNA generations have been vastly different experiences.

If you want a play thing, don't get a 6500 XT, or the 4 GB VRAM will quickly disappoint you... unless you want it for old games, for which it's absolutely fine. I happen to have one of those as well, do you want it?

 

[Dr. Dro]

Even the 5700 XT is a different animal. I had an Asus Strix which overheated, threw BSODs and driver timeout errors, and was generally a bad card. I got rid of it during covid, turning a profit and getting a 2070 myself which I didn't regret.

Then my 6750 XT is an all-around great card. Stable as any Nvidia. Then I also had a 7800 XT at some point. Its initial drivers were a bit meh, but everything got fixed in a couple of months except for the massive video playback power consumption which is an architectural problem. Other than that, great card. I'd still have it if I didn't have to prioritise my finances for the summer holidays.

So see, all 3 RDNA generations have been vastly different experiences.

If you want a play thing, don't get a 6500 XT, or the 4 GB VRAM will quickly disappoint you... unless you want it for old games, for which it's absolutely fine. I happen to have one of those as well, do you want it?

Haha thanks, probably easier and cheaper too get one locally. It's for a Core 2 build I've had planned for a while. I'm eyeing a 8 GB Sapphire ITX I find simply lovely. Really hoping it goes on sale.

 

[AusWolf]

Haha thanks, probably easier and cheaper too get one locally. It's for a Core 2 build I've had planned for a while. I'm eyeing a 8 GB Sapphire ITX I find simply lovely. Really hoping it goes on sale.

I've been eyeing the 8 GB Sapphire for a long time, but it's extremely rare unfortunately.

 

[Vayra86]

20 years ago gaming GPUs were very much about gaming and not GPGPU, although they might have supported this feature. This does not mean I don't agree with you. My point of view on that timeline is a bit different than yours, though.

You might want to look up Tesla and Quadro

 

[Hecate91]

When RTX 3050 sells 4 times more than the RX 6600, you know that the general public doesn't buy performance, but the sticker on the box.

So, it's not about features, or performance, or drivers, or whatever that many keep saying for years. The general public buys the sticker. And for that, both tech press and posters who try to invent in every case reasons to send buyers to the Nvidia brand, have the major responsibility. We are in a monopoly because tech press and countless posters online play Nvidia's game.

Even if AMD were more competitive, I doubt it would change because the consumer is gonna buy whatever is advertised more. A similar thing happens with CPU's, the tech press went hard on AMD with Zen 5, yet went easy on Intel for not delivering on the all the hype over Arrow Lake. I think even if AMD had an amazing price/performance card that beat out a higher tier from Nvidia there would be complaints of the card not having a proprietary Nvidia feature.

The mid range cards have always sold the most.

Prices will continue to go up as people demand progress because that creates more complexity.

I'm fine with PC gaming. I find PC gamers to be complete idiots who demand special treatment and have earned every bit of the toxic reputation which is if anything not nearly bad enough.

I don't care if people keep buying the latest hardware each year. But if you are doing that than you do have to look in the mirror and realize you are the problem and your purchasing and demands are the reason everything is stuck they way it is!

My problem with these midrange cards is they're barely mid range anymore, getting any upgrade from a previous card is very little to nothing at all, and when cards only come with 8GB of VRAM or are limited by bus bandwidth they should be low end at best with prices to reflect it.
I want real progress, not fake frames and upscaling so companies can cheat on marketing slides, for the prices both Nvidia and AMD are asking there needs to be a decent uplift in performance, or companies need to find a way to offset the cost of complexity. AMD could've had it figured out if the Radeon team had more R&D to spend on chiplet interconnects.
As for pc gaming, my issue with it is the amount of AAA garbage pc gamers keep buying, buggy crap that gamers for some reason still pre-order with invasive anti-cheat software worse than the cheaters.

The reason I even engage in subjects regarding AMD isn't because I hate them

Are you sure? I don't get why anyone would spend time belittling others for not buying Nvidia while on the defensive for Nvidia, it seems like you want everyone to buy Nvidia out of spite because you had a bad experience with an AMD gpu.

 

[MuhammedAbdo]

As far as I see from the graph, AMD has been holding a steady 15%

AMD isn't to blame for Nvidia's prices when they have at least 76% of the market if the Steam stats are accurate

NVIDIA has more than 76% market share. The Survey has Intel iGPU at 7%, and some AMD iGPUs included in the 15% percent of AMD (at 2.6% + 1.7%), for a total of ~ 11.5% of combined AMD + Intel iGPUs in the survey.

Spoiler: Details

Intel Iris Xe Graphics 2.55%
Intel(R) UHD Graphics 2.06%
Intel UHD Graphics 620 0.55%
Intel UHD Graphics 630 0.42%
Intel HD Graphics 520 0.30%
Intel HD Graphics 620 0.30%
Intel HD Graphics 4600 0.25%
Intel UHD Graphics 600 0.25%
Intel HD Graphics 4000 0.20%
Intel Ivy Bridge 0.18%
Intel HD Graphics 530 0.18%
Intel Haswell 0.17%
AMD Radeon Graphics: 2.6%
AMD Radeon(TM) Graphics 1.7%

It means AMD's true dGPUs share is just ~11% while NVIDIA controls the rest of 88% remaining dGPUs shares.

 

[Dr. Dro]

Are you sure? I don't get why anyone would spend time belittling others for not buying Nvidia while on the defensive for Nvidia, it seems like you want everyone to buy Nvidia out of spite because you had a bad experience with an AMD gpu.

Positive. It's nowhere near as malicious as you think, it's perhaps out of a misguided belief that if people stop buying them, they'll do something to improve.

Anyway we've just had an incident regarding this so I would like to make good on my apology to the mod team that reached out to me to go easy and steer clear of the subject for the time being. Any further inquiries, please DM.

 

[john_]

Positive. It's nowhere near as malicious as you think, it's perhaps out of a misguided belief that if people stop buying them, they'll do something to improve.

They do. They are getting out of the enthusiast market.

(what I post below has nothing to do with you, just taking a pass from your comment to repeat what I am posting the last 10 years)
The last 15 years I usually don't see misguided beliefs. I see people buying Nvidia or intel, to want to belittle AMD options to feel as the owners of premium hardware. These people will defend Nvidia or Intel at any cost, they will ignore problems with Nvidia or Intel hardware or software. I see tech press attacking AMD, because they are the easy target, a company that rarely retaliates, so they can convince their audience that they are independent media that are brave enough to go against a multi billion company. At the same time the same press will sugar coat any bad news about Intel and lately they will avoid reporting any negatives about Nvidia.

 

[evernessince]

The cost to manufacture any GPU have gone up due to complexity. It's not possible now.

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.

Stop recanting Nvidia marketing BS. The cost of producing GPUs has been going up since they were first introduced and that has been offset by the ever growing size of the market. The only difference now is that Nvidia's margins are exploding because they've massively increased prices. Anyone saying this need only look at Nvidia's balance sheet to see it's incorrect.

At the end of the day Nvidia has an 88% marketshare, which is more than the Bell Systems monopoly had before they were broken up. That's less than half the marketshare of bulldozer for reference, which is nuts.

We are all aware of AMD's stupid decisions but people expecting Zen 1 to happen on GPUs are going to be left wanting. The CPU market doesn't have a bunch of software barriers that gate off huge portions of the market like GPUs do. Nvidia has in essence built castle over large portions of the kingdom, and AMD can but take a few villages. It will take years to siege those castles and that's entirely why they were built.

If AMD and Intel are smart, they work together on open solutions. That way they both get the benefit of their combined efforts. Plus it would be nice to have GPU tech that will run regardless of GPU vendor.

They do. They are getting out of the enthusiast market.

I don't blame them. Enterprise market isn't nearly as software gated as the consumer market. Enterprise customers that need both a hardware and software solution there will often build their own bespoke application for the hardware they have on hand.

 

[AnotherReader]

@LittleBro
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.

It took a long time for the tail to wag the dog. Even in the year of the first dedicated AI chip's launch, Google's TPU, Nvidia's quarterly datacenter revenue peaked at $97 million. Until the explosive growth of AI, gaming subsidized the datacenter.

....
The bulk of the RTX 3090's price comes from the 24 GDDR6X memory chips that it required. Back in 2020 this was a real concern, I remember reading a rumor at the time that $800 of its price was just the memory chips. The 3080 had only 10 and of a lower grade in comparison. Where they really gouged was the 3090 Ti

That rumour has to be false. The 3080 had 10 GB of the same memory. If the rumour was true, then accounting for the margins of the retailer and the AIB partners such as Asus and EVGA, the cooler, PCB, VRMs and the 3080 die would have a cost to the partner of around $200. That doesn't seem realistic. Also consider HBM which was estimated to cost $1150 for 80 GB for the H100.

 

[Onasi]

@AnotherReader
And, to nobody’s surprise, 2016 was the year of Pascal - the last time they made an architecture that wasn’t deliberately screaming “compute first”. And, uh, this is 15-16. The heart of the first crypto boom. I don’t think most of that “gaming” revenue was actually gaming.

 

[Am*]

Their pricing isn't an issue. Each time they drop prices people get happy because they assume this will lead to cheaper nvidia. It never does and those same people go right out and buy nvidia despite AMD having much better value for the price.

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.

I couldn't agree more -- these same hypocrites will be the ones crying the loudest and mourning once Intel eventually exits the GPU market (if Battlemage even releases and doesn't get canned before launch), asking where the competition has gone. Meanwhile, Ngreedia will be all too happy to move their entire GPU stack two tiers up, like they did with current generation 4000 GPUs.

In saying that, I do think AMD have some part to play in their poor sales of RDNA3. Their initial MSRP pricing was not good and their recent price cuts on RDNA3 and the 7800 XT or higher cards has made them bestsellers here in the UK, regularly going out of stock far more than any Nvidia cards -- especially after their 4 game bundle with Space Marine 2 (which was the incentive I needed to pay the difference over a cheap RX 6800 to pick up the 7800 XT), so the potential is certainly there. Not sure about the situation in the rest of Europe and US, though -- but hopefully it pays off for AMD in their next quarterly results.

 

[Space Lynx]

I still think Steam survey's are dumb as hell. No reason to just not do steam survey's for everyone and get the actual numbers instead of sampling. I never get steam survey requests for example and have AMD gpu's on every item I own.

 

[AnotherReader]

@AnotherReader
And, to nobody’s surprise, 2016 was the year of Pascal - the last time they made an architecture that wasn’t deliberately screaming “compute first”. And, uh, this is 15-16. The heart of the first crypto boom. I don’t think most of that “gaming” revenue was actually gaming.

The first crypto boom ended in early 2015. Pascal was the start of the datacenter's growth, but even after the release of their first dedicated datacenter GPU, Volta, datacenter revenue trailed gaming. 2015 was also the year that saw the replacement of Kepler with Maxwell across the entire product stack and it's Maxwell that started the trend of AMD's decreasing GPU market share. The table below is copied from the Anandtech link above. It may seem like a dim memory now, but the fact remains: gaming subsidized the datacenter products until recently. In the summer of 2020, datacenter revenue exceeded gaming revenue for the first time, but even that had a significant uplift due to the acquisition of Mellanox.

​

In millions	Q4'2020​	Q3'2020​	Q4'2019​	Q/Q​	Y/Y​
Gaming	$1491​	$1659​	$954​	-10%​	+56%​
Professional Visualization	$331​	$324​	$293​	+2%​	+13%​
Datacenter	$968​	$726​	$679​	+33%​	+43%​
Automotive	$163​	$162​	$163​	+1%​	0%​
OEM & IP	$152​	$143​	$116​	+6%​	+31%​

 

[Onasi]

@AnotherReader
Again, do I need to explain the sharp increase in “gaming” revenue in 2020? But fair point still, “gaming” or at least consumer oriented cards were and still are, really, a big piece of the pie for NV. Didn’t say they weren’t. Hence the silly arguments I sometimes see about “NV will just stop making gaming cards lol” don’t sit with me. It’s a nice captive audience that buys all the refuse they have from enterprise. Giving it up would be silly.
I also have no idea whether or not these charts include their massive HPC supercomputer contracts under datacenter. I would assume so, but…

 

[64K]

I still think Steam survey's are dumb as hell. No reason to just not do steam survey's for everyone and get the actual numbers instead of sampling. I never get steam survey requests for example and have AMD gpu's on every item I own.

If Steam made the Survey 100% without consent then there would be an outcry of spying. You have to understand how the Survey works. It's not info that you provide yourself because some people would make mistakes about their hardware. If you agree to be surveyed then Steam scans your PC and records your info. That way it is accurate.

If Steam started scanning gamer's PCs without permission people would have a fit about snooping.

Edit: It's actually pretty rare to be selected. I have only been chosen twice in over 15 years. There is a way to force Steam to survey you to. Just Google that and do it. Steam has that available as an option. Then your hardware will be in the mix too.

 

[AnotherReader]

@AnotherReader
Again, do I need to explain the sharp increase in “gaming” revenue in 2020? But fair point still, “gaming” or at least consumer oriented cards were and still are, really, a big piece of the pie for NV. Didn’t say they weren’t. Hence the silly arguments I sometimes see about “NV will just stop making gaming cards lol” don’t sit with me. It’s a nice captive audience that buys all the refuse they have from enterprise. Giving it up would be silly.
I also have no idea whether or not these charts include their massive HPC supercomputer contracts under datacenter. I would assume so, but…

I agree that the various crypto booms make attribution of some of the revenue dubious; however, 2015 was the year of the first crypto winter. As for HPC, until AI's growth, datacenter was basically HPC. I concur that gaming revenue is pretty substantial and it wouldn't make sense for Nvidia to leave gaming.

 

[JohH]

Really can't do anything about it when consumers buy the RTX 3050 8GB for more than an RX 6600.

 

[LittleBro]

Do note that this table lists all the cards with full chip transistor count. This is often not the case. The cheaper cards use chips that are scuffed in some way and are, in a sense, a way for companies to sell off what isn’t good enough. You aren’t paying the listed transistors per $.

In some cases those numbers are valid. Just wanted to point out that increasing prices is not always about raising chip complexity and more demanding process. Sometimes miracles can obviously happen and RTX 2080 has same MSRP as RTX 3080, yet the latter has more than twice the transistors count and is made on more sophisticated process node.

I'll update that table tomorrow with more cards, so we can see what we are paying for with compared to all those fully unlocked dies. But I can tell right away that 3090 Ti will end up even worse than 3090, because + 500 USD on MSRP for 500 more shaders.

 

[Onasi]

But I can tell right away that 3090 Ti will end up even worse than 3090, because + 500 USD on MSRP for 500 more shaders.

Oh no, the 3090Ti was absolutely a rip-off, insanely so. I don’t think anyone would be deranged enough to try and contort mentally in order to explain how much of a value it was. I think it was a combination of a high from crypto prices and NV wanting to sell off remaining full GA102s that didn’t go into enterprise/pro cards they had lying around by the end of Ampere cycle and make a quick buck on that.

 

[DemonicRyzen666]

Still the cheapest modern GPU that you can buy, along with the 7600 which is equally bad value. For some people (for lots of people, it seems) price is more important than value. Not exactly shocking these days.


As far as I see from the graph, AMD has been holding a steady 15%. Also, there's consoles where AMD dominates. It's not all doom and gloom, imo.

the RX 7600 XT is faster over all in most games, & it's usually slightly cheaper.

 

[LittleBro]

Oh no, the 3090Ti was absolutely a rip-off, insanely so. I don’t think anyone would be deranged enough to try and contort mentally in order to explain how much of a value it was. I think it was a combination of a high from crypto prices and NV wanting to sell off remaining full GA102s that didn’t go into enterprise/pro cards they had lying around by the end of Ampere cycle and make a quick buck on that.

And 3090 was not a ripoff? Having at disposal 95% of unlocked 3090 Ti while achieving 114% performance of 3080 ...

 

[Onasi]

@LittleBro
At OG MSRP considering the 24 gigs of new and expensive GDDR6X and it being a halo card (those are by default bad value)? Nah, it was okay. Transistor per dollar isn’t everything, which is why I am not too hot on you using it as a metric.
What it did end up selling at eventually in real world is another matter entirely.

 

[yfn_ratchet]

Mind you everyone, Steam Hardware Survey also contains a huge amount of:

1. OEM Prebuilts
2. Chinese PCs
3. Both.

And in those markets, people generally only want something 'good enough' and will likely be playing primarily esports titles or grindfests (looking at you, War Thunder). Green sells way better than red, because the popular perception of 'Nvidia is the gamer's choice' is still prevalent. They'd have to actually massively flop for that to change. Ada was just disappointing.

Were you to ask PC enthusiasts exclusively, I imagine far more 6800XTs, 7800XTs, and 7900XTXs would turn up.

 

[GhostRyder]

I think it comes down to 3 main issues personally:

1: The overwhelming majority of big streamers/pro gamers/people with influence in that sector use high end Nvidia cards (Normally XX80 series or XX90 cards) so that publicity is going to pass on to people who follow them.
2: Bad perception of AMD GPU's from over 10 years ago which is exasperated by people who still reference it like it happens today.
3: AMD not competing for high end/not outright beating the top Nvidia GPU for a long time at least by enough where its a definitive victory (Until the 3090ti for instance, the 6900 XT/6950 XT were better in many cases against the 3090 but its not an outright win between the 3090 and 6900 XT). This makes the perception like a budget GPU which many people don't like already, and if that's what they are going for then the GPU needs to outright be a significantly better deal instead of just a little better deal.

I have said for a very long time, its going to come down to AMD basically either making GPU's cheaper than the competitor by a significant amount while being better to get people's foot in the door. Or they need to make their highest end cards better and sponsor famous people to use their cards to get their name in peoples mouths as more than a budget brand.

Also, they need to work on their naming. I am getting sick of all the dumb names on their cards that confuse the heck out of everyone. Drop the XTX and GRE names, keep the names where there is a non-XT and an XT version per number. If you decide to make a new revision (Similar to Nvidia doing a "Super" revision) then use the XX50 nomenclature to differentiate it. Make it easy to follow so people are not staring at the lineup going "What the heck is a 7900 GRE".