August Steam hardware survey shows AMD increasing its CPU share as Intel falters, Turing...

midian182

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What just happened? Valve has released its latest Steam Hardware and Software survey—a little later this month, due to the Labor Day Holiday. Some of the main takeaways for August was that AMD’s CPU share is continuing to rise, and while the top three graphics cards remain the same, the RTX series keeps making gains.

Starting with processors, it appears that AMD has turned a corner. After several months of Intel increasing its share among Steam users while its rival went in the opposite direction, the trends reversed back in July and continued in August. Intel now has an 81 percent share among survey participants, while AMD has 19 percent. It’s likely that the popular Ryzen 3000 processors have contributed to this reversal and will continue to do so in the future.

When it comes to video cards, the top three most popular choices—GTX 1060, 1050 Ti, and 1050—all retained their positions despite experiencing declines.

Some of the biggest increases last month were for the GTX 1070 (0.21 percent) and GTX 1080 (0.20 percent) cards that are in fourth and fifth position, respectively. Many people are snapping up these products as prices in the second-hand market fall due to gamers upgrading and selling their older cards.

The other effect of consumers upgrading is that the Nvidia’s RTX line is growing in popularity, albeit it at a slow and steady pace. The RTX 2070 remains the most common, found in 1.39 percent of Steam survey participants’ machines. Next is the RTX 2060 (1.27 percent), followed by the RTX 2080 (0.86 percent). AMD’s highest entry is the Radeon RX 580 in eleventh, which is up 0.07 percent from the previous month.

There were few significant changes elsewhere, though Windows 10 continues to expand the gap between itself and Windows 7—no doubt a result of the latter’s end-of-extended-support date now just four months away.

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Baby steps.
It will take years for AMD to massively change the narrative as Intels reputation is an immovable object but they are off to a great start. I want to offer a legit congratulations to AMD, those folks in Cally should be very proud.
I'd buy them all a round of Sams Octoberfest if I could.

As far as the GTX 1070 and 1080 gaining .20 percent share, they are just a great buy right now. I picked up a like new Asus GTX 1080 for $300 shipped, so I am getting better performance (by a smidgen) then the $500 RTX 2070 and I could care less about RT, however in 2-3 years when Ray Tracing might be worth having, RTX 2000 series cards will cost MUCH less as by that time RTX 3000, possible 4000 cards will be out.
For me personally Pascal will truly and finally be the last upgrade for my old girl, when its time to upgrade again its going to be a timewarp for yours truly.
 
The fact people bought the 1050 Ti over the RX 570 shows how dumb most "PC Master Race" gamers are.
Remember that during the crypto craze the RX 570 cost way more than the 1050 Ti, making the 1050 Ti a better deal. That's why we have one in the house. The 1050 Ti was $209 (still ridiculous) while the RX 570 was over $300 and almost nonexistent.
 
The fact people bought the 1050 Ti over the RX 570 shows how dumb most "PC Master Race" gamers are.
Which is why a best value for performance analysis is always a good thing to do before dropping hard earned cash. Wish it were a more standardized feature as reports of bazillions of fps is such a narrow viewpoint (Just what can you see that is different when you move from 200 fps to 270 fps? Um, uh, nothing...)
 
Love seeing AMD dominate with vulkan support.
Every other driver we get new extensions added.

18.10.1 WHQL
Added Vulkan™ Extension Support
VK_KHR_shader_atomic_int64
This extension advertises the SPIR-V Int64Atomics capability for Vulkan, which allows a shader to contain 64-bit atomic operations on signed and unsigned integers.
VK_KHR_driver_properties
This extension provides a new physical device query which allows retrieving information about the driver implementation, allowing applications to determine
which physical device corresponds to which particular vendor’s driver, and which conformance test suite version the driver implementation is compliant with.
SPV_GOOGLE_decorate_string
This extension provides two new instructions to decorate a variable or a struct member with a string.
SPV_GOOGLE_hlsl_functionality1
This extension provides two new decorations to extend HLSL functionality: HlslCounterBuffer and HlslSemantic.

18.11.2 Driver
Added Vulkan™ Extension Support
VK_AMD_memory_overalloation_behavior
This extension allows controlling whether explicit overallocation beyond the device memory heap sizes is allowed or not.

18.12.2 Driver
Added Vulkan Support
VK_EXT_inline_uniform_block
This extension introduces the ability to back uniform blocks directly with descriptor sets by storing inline uniform data within descriptor pool storage.
VK_KHR_swapchain_mutable_format
This extension enables processing of swapchain images as different formats to that used by the window system, which is particularly useful for switching between sRGB and linear RGB formats.
VK_EXT_scalar_block_layout
This extension enables C-like structure layout for uniform and storage buffers, allowing non-scalar types to be aligned solely based on the size of their components.
Sparse Support is Enabled
Sparse support relaxes the requirement to have memory allocated and bound to resources prior to being used. It also relaxes the requirement for the bound memory to be contiguous and for the memory bindings to be immutable.

19.6.2 Driver
VK_EXT_host_query_reset
Allows resets of queries from the host, rather than on the GPU.
VK_EXT_full_screen_exclusive
Gives applications explicit control over exclusive full-screen modes (this is for instance useful for HDR support).
VK_AMD_display_native_hdr
Exposes FreeSync2 capabilities for improved HDR support.
VK_EXT_separate_stencil_usage
Separates the usage flags for depth/stencil aspects of a depth/stencil image making it possible to restrict/expand the usage relative to the depth aspect.
VK_KHR_uniform_buffer_standard_layout
Provides more flexible alignment for uniform buffers, enabling among other things, the usage of std430 layouts in Vulkan.

19.7.3
VK_EXT_display_surface_counter
This extension defines a vertical blanking period counter associated with display surfaces. It provides a mechanism to query support for such a counter from a VkSurfaceKHR object
VK_AMD_pipeline_compiler_control
This extension provides a way to set per-pipeline compiler options, for instance, to relax rounding rules when working with mixed-precision floating point values.
VK_AMD_shader_core_properties2
This extension exposes additional, AMD specific shader core properties for a physical device
VK_EXT_subgroup_size_control
This extension provides additional control over subgroup size, allowing applications for instance to opt-in to different subgroup sizes on devices supporting more than just one.
VK_KHR_imageless_framebuffer
This extension allows framebuffers to be created without the need for creating images first, allowing more flexibility in how they are used, and avoiding the need for many of the compatibility rules.
VK_KHR_variable_pointers
This extension allows implementations to indicate their level of support for the SPV_KHR_variable_pointers SPIR-V extension. The SPIR-V extension allows shader modules to use invocation-private
pointers into uniform and/or storage buffers, where the pointer values can be dynamic and non-uniform. This release adds the optional VariablePointers support.

19.9.1
VK_AMD_device_coherent_memory
This extension adds device coherent and device uncached memory types. Device coherent and uncached memory
are expected to have lower performance for general access than non-device coherent memory but can be useful in
certain scenarios particularly so for debugging.
VK_EXT_calibrated_timestamps This extension provides an interface to query calibrated timestamps obtained quasi
simultaneously from two time domains such as host and device time domains.
VK_EXT_line_rasterization - This extension adds some line rasterization features that are commonly used in CAD
applications and that are supported in other APIs like OpenGL. These features include Bresenham-style line rasterization,
smooth rectangular lines (coverage to alpha) and stippled lines for all three line rasterization modes.
VK_EXT_shader_demote_to_helper_invocation - This extension adds Vulkan support for the SPV_EXT_demote_to_helper_invocation SPIR-V extension.
The SPIR-V extension provides a new instruction that allows shaders to "demote" a fragment shader invocation to behave like a helper invocation for its duration.
The demoted invocation will have no further side effects and will not output to the framebuffer but remains active and can
participate in computing derivatives and in subgroup operations. This is a better match for the "discard" instruction in HLSL.
 
The fact people bought the 1050 Ti over the RX 570 shows how dumb most "PC Master Race" gamers are.

Depends what their experience with AMD drivers has been.

Yup agreed, AMD drivers aren’t the best. Ive been building for over 20 years and drivers from ATI/AMD have eaten considerably more of my time than Nvidia drivers have done. And the issues don’t tend to be with the how the drivers perform or their stability, it’s more installation issues and other glitches that cause problems. They also release far less frequently than Nvidia drivers do. At one point they were only releasing 1 WHQL driver a year. In the past however, you could always get an AMD card for a fair amount less than the Nvidia competitor and this usually made the driver issues worth dealing with. But since the mining era we haven’t really seen this, the 5700 is quite a bit cheaper than it’s Nvidia equivalent but Navi is rife with issues, I wouldn’t touch it personally.

If you think AMD card drivers are bad then just wait until you see the Vega mobile drivers, they are practically non existent. I’ve had 2 Ryzen laptops in the last 14 months and I believe I’ve only seen one driver release. Despite this Vega 8 is hugely preferable to Intel’s UHD620.
 
I get slight visual artifacts and screen tearing even with vsync on, is that a driver problem or is it the gpu?

The screen tearing seems to be based on how each game handles VSync. I get screen tearing with different games based sometimes with no VSync, or VSync, or set to 60fps (with a 60Hz monitor). I just mess with those settings until it looks right. This is with Nvidia cards.
 
The fact people bought the 1050 Ti over the RX 570 shows how dumb most "PC Master Race" gamers are.

Depends what their experience with AMD drivers has been.

I must say that my experience with both AMD and Nvidia has been one where an Nvidia GPU actually died because of updates, while AMD GPU's have been fine. That's just as anecdotal as your contribution, though. Policy wise, Nvidia has been mistreating their own customers quite a bit more than AMD/ATI, AFAIK.
 
Seems like 1660Ti is going to replace the 1060 to become the most popular card for steam user, very fast and steady adoption rate. I guess being the most power efficient Turing paid off for internet cafe/ gaming venue.
 
I get slight visual artifacts and screen tearing even with vsync on, is that a driver problem or is it the gpu?

Visual artifacts in my experience are typically the GPU. FPS falling below the refresh of your monitor can cause screen tearing with vsync on.
 
Too bad people are stupid enough to buy overpriced turing trash. And its No wonder that turing goes over 3000$, or x570 up to 1000$ - *****s WANT to be milked dry, BAD.
 
The fact people bought the 1050 Ti over the RX 570 shows how dumb most "PC Master Race" gamers are.

Depends what their experience with AMD drivers has been.

But since the mining era we haven’t really seen this, the 5700 is quite a bit cheaper than it’s Nvidia equivalent but Navi is rife with issues, I wouldn’t touch it personally.

I believe Navi's slight launch issues are preferable to the many people who were limited to playing space invanders on their Nvidia card after it catastrophically failed. Let's not forget the 2 major bugged drivers Nvidia had last year, one causing fans to stop and the other bricking your windows install.

You'd take issue with the AMD card requiring you change HDMI scaling but have no problem with system breaking bugs from Nvidia?

Please. Both sides are far from perfect.
 
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