Latest Steam Survey results: AMD rebounds, more Ampere cards appear

[midian182]

What just happened? Valve has released its Steam Hardware Survey results for January. In the area of graphics cards, we see that more Ampere products are starting to appear in gamers’ machines, with the RTX 3090, RTX 3080, and RTX 3060 Ti now on the list. AMD, meanwhile, has regained the CPU share it lost in December.

Steam’s latest monthly hardware survey shows that the GTX 1060 remains the number one GPU. It’s been the most popular among the platform’s users since it knocked the GTX 750 Ti off the top spot in January 2018. The number of machines rocking the Pascal card has been declining for months, but its 9.75 percent share keeps the GTX 1060 on top.

More of Nvidia’s Ampere line is making it into the survey results. The excellent RTX 3080 had previously been the only entry, increasing its share every month to its current 0.66 percent figure. It’s now joined by the RTX 3060 Ti (0.27 percent) and RTX 3090 (0.23 percent). That gives Ampere a 1.16 percent share of all graphics cards.

As usual, Nvidia dominates this area; the most popular AMD card is the Radeon RX 580 in tenth place, while none of the Radeon RX 6000 series have broken into the list yet.

Moving onto CPUs, it was a good month for AMD. Team red’s processors are now found in 28 percent of all participants’ PCs, marking one of its largest-ever monthly increases (3 percent) following an unexpected decline in December.

Elsewhere, 1920 x 1080 remains the most popular monitor resolution by far—66.7 percent—while 1440p declined by 2.2 percent, surprisingly. Windows 10 64-bit continues to push other versions of the OS out, increasing its share to 91.7 percent; most people have between 250GB to 499GB free hard drive space, and 16GB remains the most popular amount of system RAM.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/88506-latest-steam-survey-results-amd-takes-chunk-intel.html

 

[Lounds]

AMD's share will continue to Ryze(n) as they're now selling more laptops with their cpu's in them. Plus over the Christmas period loads of prebuilt 3200G systems were sold as 'gaming PC's', which lots of parents bought their children.

 

[QuantumPhysics]

AMD and NVIDIA are both strong stock buys and have been since March 18th.

I did my best to get as many people into them - as well as Logitech, before the quarantine caused them to rise in value.

Whether you’re gaming, driving EV, or wasting energy mining crypto (not really a currency), those stocks are the big plays.

 

[Irata]

Isn‘t it odd that the RTX 3070 does not appear at all ? It was released before the 3060Ti and seems to have a better availability than the latter, at least in my market.

 

[Achaios]

"while none of the Radeon RX 6000 series have broken into the list yet."

That's because AMD Radeon 6K GPUs practically and for all intends and purposes, do not exist outside the bubble of Tech Journalists and You Tubers.

Sure, Jayz from Jayz Two Cents might have 1 or 2 dozens, same with Linus, but normal ppl don't.

Meanwhile, Radeon 6K GPU's are out of stock in Greece since last year. Not sure they were ever in stock to begin with tbh.

Honestly, GPU's such as the Radeon 6k series give "vaporware" a bad name, they are phantomware.

 

[punctualturn]

The power of marketing will always win on the weak minded.

 

[Lew Zealand]

Which just shows how crap these numbers are. They might be OK for the most general of trends but that's about it.

Suddenly over 1/3 of all RTX 2070 owners just junked their cards? 14% of all 1060 owners (a huge raw number) junked theirs? And the Intel v. AMD CPU numbers of the past 3 months-- can we assume any of those 3 numbers are accurate? Maybe in the most general sense that there's about a 3:1 proportion.

Maybe.

 

[Wrinkle]

Isn‘t it odd that the RTX 3070 does not appear at all ? It was released before the 3060Ti and seems to have a better availability than the latter, at least in my market.

The 3070 seems to be the red headed stepchild. It's caught between the cheapest but already overpriced 3060 and the ever rising price of 3080's.

In my country the price of a 3080 went up by 20% within 3 weeks and the 3070 now costs as much as a 3080 used to cost at that time. People are aware of this.

Apart from a few enthusiasts nobody is going to buy 3070's at these ridiculous prices. Most people are going to wait a few more months to see if availability improves and more important, if prices go down.

I'm currently trying to decide to get either a game laptop with a 30xx card because they're actually a good deal compared to a separate card or to switch over to Xbox series X which has hands down the best value for money at the moment (or ps5 but I'm not a PlayStation guy).

 

[TechZel]

"while none of the Radeon RX 6000 series have broken into the list yet."

That's because AMD Radeon 6K GPUs practically and for all intends and purposes, do not exist outside the bubble of Tech Journalists and You Tubers.

Sure, Jayz from Jayz Two Cents might have 1 or 2 dozens, same with Linus, but normal ppl don't.

Meanwhile, Radeon 6K GPU's are out of stock in Greece since last year. Not sure they were ever in stock to begin with tbh.

Honestly, GPU's such as the Radeon 6k series give "vaporware" a bad name, they are phantomware.

There's still a number of RX 6000 series appearing in Australia, not too far behind the stock of 3080s I'd say based on the discord bot that alerts me to new stock. Worldwide there are certainly far less of them available than RTX 3000, but they are not 'vaporware' just because none are showing up in your market.

I wouldn't expect them to start appearing in large quantities any time soon though, given how much TSMC 7nm capacity is being hogged by two new consoles as well as Zen 3 CPUs. The Radeon division almost certainly has the lowest priority for production.

 

[pcnthuziast]

Availability will not improve and prices will go up, never down. Period. Many people are literally going to have to find a new hobby.

 

[Irata]

The 3070 seems to be the red headed stepchild. It's caught between the cheapest but already overpriced 3060 and the ever rising price of 3080's.

In my country the price of a 3080 went up by 20% within 3 weeks and the 3070 now costs as much as a 3080 used to cost at that time. People are aware of this.

Apart from a few enthusiasts nobody is going to buy 3070's at these ridiculous prices. Most people are going to wait a few more months to see if availability improves and more important, if prices go down.

I'm currently trying to decide to get either a game laptop with a 30xx card because they're actually a good deal compared to a separate card or to switch over to Xbox series X which has hands down the best value for money at the moment (or ps5 but I'm not a PlayStation guy).

The odd thing is that in my country neither the 3060Ti nor the 3080 have seen much availability if at all. You essentially have the choice between a very expensive 3090 or a 3070.

Checking a retailer that has all, I see € 739 for the 3060Ti that‘s in stock, € 849 for the cheapest 3070 and € 1299 for the only 3080 that is listed but if you go on details it‘s sold out.

This can be different in other markets, but again, the 3070 and 3090 are / were the nVidia cards with the best availability.

 

[ChristopherB]

Which just shows how crap these numbers are. They might be OK for the most general of trends but that's about it.

Suddenly over 1/3 of all RTX 2070 owners just junked their cards? 14% of all 1060 owners (a huge raw number) junked theirs? And the Intel v. AMD CPU numbers of the past 3 months-- can we assume any of those 3 numbers are accurate? Maybe in the most general sense that there's about a 3:1 proportion.

Maybe.

I think that you are looking at it the wrong way. I think you need to reconsider how both the steam hardware survey and random sampling work. In addition to that you don't take into account the number of new users on steam and the number of new graphics cards and new computers in the market.

You can add users and new systems to steam and have the percentage of certain cards go down drastically without having the actual number of cards change greatly. How many people bought new graphics cards, desktops, and laptops during black Friday and the Christmas season? Black Friday has expanded and isn't just a North America event now.

There are other factors to consider. Such as many 1060 owners finally have a reason to upgrade when cards become available in the new or used market. The performance increase is worth the money in many cases now if you can get a new card at or near MSRP. The 1060 was also widely popular with cryptocurrency miners. Also, the 2070 and 2070 Super have been one of the popular cards being bought up by cryptocurrency miners the past few months. This is due to their power consumption whens et up for mining and performance per watt allow them to be one of the lowest cost cards to be run in groups of 10 off of one power supply.

"while none of the Radeon RX 6000 series have broken into the list yet."

That's because AMD Radeon 6K GPUs practically and for all intends and purposes, do not exist outside the bubble of Tech Journalists and You Tubers.

Sure, Jayz from Jayz Two Cents might have 1 or 2 dozens, same with Linus, but normal ppl don't.

Meanwhile, Radeon 6K GPU's are out of stock in Greece since last year. Not sure they were ever in stock to begin with tbh.

Honestly, GPU's such as the Radeon 6k series give "vaporware" a bad name, they are phantomware.

The RX 6000 series was a paper launch despite what AMD claims. I was told that the entire nationwide allotment of RX 6000 series cards for all microcenter stores in the U.S. was about 500 cards. That number makes sense considering most microcenter stores had between 8 and 12 cards available for launch day. Someone I know who works on the corporate side of BestBuy said their launch day availability of the RX 6000 series cards was so small that it was almost not worth mentioning.

 

[Lew Zealand]

I think that you are looking at it the wrong way. I think you need to reconsider how both the steam hardware survey and random sampling work. In addition to that you don't take into account the number of new users on steam and the number of new graphics cards and new computers in the market.

You can add users and new systems to steam and have the percentage of certain cards go down drastically without having the actual number of cards change greatly. How many people bought new graphics cards, desktops, and laptops during black Friday and the Christmas season? Black Friday has expanded and isn't just a North America event now.

There are other factors to consider. Such as many 1060 owners finally have a reason to upgrade when cards become available in the new or used market. The performance increase is worth the money in many cases now if you can get a new card at or near MSRP. The 1060 was also widely popular with cryptocurrency miners. Also, the 2070 and 2070 Super have been one of the popular cards being bought up by cryptocurrency miners the past few months. This is due to their power consumption whens et up for mining and performance per watt allow them to be one of the lowest cost cards to be run in groups of 10 off of one power supply.

I've been following the Steam survey for a few years now and one thing that happens frequently is a dip or increase in a number of different metrics, like CPU brand or Video card %age, which then corrects back to the previous trend after 1 to 3 months.

If Steam is actually sampling enough people these monthly or quarterly dips should not happen and the trends should be pretty smooth. But they aren't, like the Intel vs. AMD numbers last month.

I'll make a prediction right here: The GTX 1060 numbers will go back up within the next 3 months back to the trendline they had been following previously. And the 2070 will do the same, though with smaller total numbers this correction may be noisier.