AMD crashes in latest Steam survey

midian182

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What just happened? It’s the start of the month, which means Steam has released the latest results of the hardware and software survey. August was not a good month for AMD; the company's CPU share crashed by -1.88% to 27.31%, its lowest point of the year so far, and the Radeon RX 6000 series still isn’t in enough participants' PCs to make the main GPU list. Nvidia on the other hand, experienced gains across all but one of its Ampere line, while the RTX 2060 moved closer to becoming the top graphics card.

AMD had been gaining on Intel in the Steam survey's CPU category throughout 2021, finally passing the 30% mark in May, but its celebrations were short-lived: having fallen below that milestone a month later, team red’s share is now 27.31%.

We do know that AMD's processors have faced more supply issues than Intel's in recent times. We've also seen more Intel CPUs break into Amazon’s best sellers chart—it now has four in the top ten—a list that AMD once dominated.

Looking at graphics cards, it was an excellent month for the RTX 2060. The Turing product saw the highest increase in users (1.35%), pushing it into second place. We heard back in February that Nvidia would be “relaunching” the RTX 2060 to help alleviate crippling graphics card shortages, so we could be seeing the results of that action.

Nvidia will also be happy with the performance of its Ampere line. Only the RTX 3090 lost user share in August, down just -0.01%. The RTX 3060 saw the largest gains, up 0.42%. A recent report showed both Ampere and RDNA 2 cards were getting more expensive and scarce, so it’ll be interesting to see if that’s reflected in next month’s survey.

The GTX 1060, meanwhile, cemented its long-held (since January 2018) top position with a 1.29% increase. We also see that no Radeon RX 6000-series cards have taken the minimum 0.15% overall share to make it into the main list. The Vulkan Systems section shows the highest RDNA 2 card to be the Radeon RX 6700 XT with a 0.24% share. However, all cards under this category are shown with twice their overall share, so the actual figure is just 0.12%.

Using this same method, we see the Radeon RX 6800 XT has 0.10%, the Radeon RX 6900 XT is on 0.08%, and the Radeon RX 6800 is at 0.04%. Even the RTX 3070 Ti, which only entered the chart last month, has a 0.23% share.

Elsewhere in the survey, Windows 7 64-bit continues its surprising resurgence and is now found on 8.68% of participants’ PCs. And the Oculus Quest 2 remains the top VR headset despite losing a few percentage points, likely due to Facebook temporarily suspending sales for most of the month over skin irritation reports.

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Honestly if I didn't specifically need the APU part of the 5600g I would have gone with an 11400F instead: it's just quite the deal. And I think AMD is well aware of this but they simply can't afford to bring a 5600 non x variant without the GPU to cut down the price to compete with intel: prices and availability from TSMC just won't allow them.

It's very ironic that the thing that has held back intel for the past 5 years or so, their foundries, are now giving them a brief breath of fresh air.
 
Intel is cheaper by a good amount. You can get a 10600K for $90 less than a 5600X here. 10700K is $160 less than the 5800X. 10700K Avengers box is actually $60 less than the standard retail SKU so $220 less than a 5800X! In stock too. All of the above. That's insane.

I got my 5600X on sale for $369 when full price was $419. Now full price is $389.
 
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It's sad that AMD have just completely abandoned the low-mid range. There was zero real price competition to the i3-10100F / i5-10400F. They appear to have stopped making the R3-3100. The 3300X has been pure vapourware in many regions all along. The 3600 inflated up to +50%. The 5000 series were already double the price the 1000-3000 series were and the 5600x ended up +30% more than the i7-10700F at one point. They had a golden opportunity to seize a large chunk of the market with an updated 4200G / 4400G APU during severe GPU shortages, yet completely refused to sell 4000 APU's to non-OEM's, and even with the 5000 APU series there's no 5300X or 5300G. At the end of the day if they refuse to sell anything less than $240, then despite higher profits on what they do sell, market share will inevitably shrink for the bulk of people buying sub $240 components.

As for the GPU list, that only one single 3000 card (3070) is in the top 20 list and all 3000 cards combined have a market share of (6%) almost a year post-launch, it's pretty obvious what non-gaming usage the millions of 3000 cards sold are being snapped up for. But then more people using a 1-2 gen old card in turn means there's less rush to go buy a new expensive CPU if you're already likely to remain GPU bottlenecked for another 2 years, so CPU sales are inevitably going to slow down even further if the GPU market remains screwed up for another 2 years...

"Elsewhere in the survey, Windows 7 64-bit continues its surprising resurgence and is now found on 8.68% of participants’ PCs."
It's not "surprising" at all. What happened there was everyone who uninstalled Steam and switched to mining "dropped out" of being counted by Steam HWSurvey. Then when the Chinese govt started clamping down, they (at least many public facing PC's, eg, Internet cafe's, etc) reinstalled Steam and switched back to gaming. Many W7 installs never really "fell", it's just that W7 + non-gaming miner rigs were not counted if they didn't run Steam.
 
One thing to keep in mind is that Steam sends the survey to random users, so these 1% - 3% monthly fluctuations are nothing to draw conclusions from.

The GPU situation however is very telling, Nvidia is clearly the one with the bigger stock.
 
It's sad that AMD have just completely abandoned the low-mid range. There was zero real price competition to the i3-10100F / i5-10400F. They appear to have stopped making the R3-3100. The 3300X has been pure vapourware in many regions all along. The 3600 inflated up to +50%. The 5000 series were already double the price the 1000-3000 series were and the 5600x ended up +30% more than the i7-10700F at one point. They had a golden opportunity to seize a large chunk of the market with an updated 4200G / 4400G APU during severe GPU shortages, yet completely refused to sell 4000 APU's to non-OEM's, and even with the 5000 APU series there's no 5300X or 5300G. At the end of the day if they refuse to sell anything less than $240, then despite higher profits on what they do sell, market share will inevitably shrink for the bulk of people buying sub $240 components.

As for the GPU list, that only one single 3000 card (3070) is in the top 20 list and all 3000 cards combined have a market share of (6%) almost a year post-launch, it's pretty obvious what non-gaming usage the millions of 3000 cards sold are being snapped up for. But then more people using a 1-2 gen old card in turn means there's less rush to go buy a new expensive CPU if you're already likely to remain GPU bottlenecked for another 2 years, so CPU sales are inevitably going to slow down even further if the GPU market remains screwed up for another 2 years...


It's not "surprising" at all. What happened there was everyone who uninstalled Steam and switched to mining "dropped out" of being counted by Steam HWSurvey. Then when the Chinese govt started clamping down, they (at least many public facing PC's, eg, Internet cafe's, etc) reinstalled Steam and switched back to gaming. Many W7 installs never really "fell", it's just that W7 + non-gaming miner rigs were not counted if they didn't run Steam.

I think AMD isn't unwilling to compete in the low end they just can't due to shortage of 7nm. Intel did the same thing few years ago when they had 14nm shortage
 
So, the GTX 1060 sees a noticeable increase, so does Windows 7 (at the expense of all other Windows versions) and simplified Chinese as language….

Hmm…what could all these have in common / point to ?

This is a good start. But I would like to see more explanations on why the Steam survey is not representative/Nvidia and Intel are bad/Posting this is sinister Techspot agenda. Because I own some AMD gear and this news makes me feel really insecure.
 
I've been seeing some steep deals for Intel CPUs lately, so between that and the supply issues it makes sense.

Also, LOL @ the Intel bestsellers being 9 and 10 series chips. Rocket Lake was such a nothingburger release...
 
This is a good start. But I would like to see more explanations on why the Steam survey is not representative/Nvidia and Intel are bad/Posting this is sinister Techspot agenda. Because I own some AMD gear and this news makes me feel really insecure.
That‘s an interesting interpretation of my post.

But if you find an increase for a no longer sold / supported OS in combination with an increase for a GPU that hasn‘t been available for a long while and the large increase in Chinese language is not a bit odd *in combination*, more power to you.

Also: Why would I care what others have as long as I can get what I want ?

However, that does not mean I don‘t want to understand what is behind data that‘s being presented. In this regard, I am rather curious.
 
The more this keep happening, the more we are observing how unreliable it is.

So what happened, 1.88% of people simply destroyed their CPU's and moved to Intel?

Another bunch simply decided to remove whichever OS they had and go back to W7?

Somehow, nobody with an AMD gpu 6K series that are definetly playing games, not mining, shows up in the survey?

PopOS has an ISO that comes with Nvidia drivers preinstalled.

And since AMD is way friendlier to their customers and FOSS, their drivers are already included in all distros, so the point is?
 
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Most of AMD's gpus are going to miners which is why you see the poor showing on steam.
My understanding is that the current RDNA2 GPU's are not that good for mining, so I wonder about that.


Steam has also been pretty unreliable with their hardware surveys so I would take their results with a grain of salt.
Agreed and at this point, a grain of salt is not enough, we should use huge bags of salt.
 
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I just realized that there is no differentiation for Nvidia GPUs (desktop, mobile, Max-Q) in this survey. I wonder if they did this on purpose. 🤔
 
PopOS has an ISO that comes with Nvidia drivers preinstalled.
Installing the drivers is the easy part, it's even painless on Arch Linux thanks to the dkms package.

However, the NVIDIA drivers still has many issues compared to AMD's open source drivers. The top ones that come to my mind is that screen tearing is a common issue unless you turn on a feature that causes a rather large latency boost, Laptop with NVIDIA Optimus are basically unsupported, and are an absolute pain to set up and even when you do, there's usually a heavy performance hit, though this could have changed. To top it off, NVIDIA's drivers still have awful support for Wayland and just straight up none for XWayland, which is needed for gaming on Wayland, which is now becoming the default display server for desktop experiences, some don't even work on NVIDIA due to this.
 
In the EU at least...AMD are outselling Intel by a large margin (according to mindfactory)
Nvidia are top dogs in the GPU stakes though. Maybe very few people in the EU have Steam installed. /s
 
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