Even the Absurdly Expensive RTX 3090 is More Popular Than All Radeon 6000s Combined
Steam's monthly hardware survey shows which company dominates the gaming GPU market. Nvidia easily beats AMD, whose flagship chips did not appear in the list.
Steam's latest hardware survey shows that Nvidia is still the most popular choice among gamers. Of course, it should be remembered that the results of the survey do not present the full picture, but they give us an idea of the general situation in the PC market. And apparently it doesn't look good for AMD, because their flagship GPUs did not find their way into the the top list. One of the Reddit users, however, found a way (via PCGamer) to get around this problem. It turns out that the Radeon RX 6000 chips were counted among the systems that support the Vulkan API. How did the cards with RDNA 2 fare against the competing RTX 3000s?
AMD's flagship Radeon RX 6900 XT has only 0.08% share among the respondents, the RX 6800 XT only 0.1%, and RX 6800 boasts only 0.05%. The largest share of AMD's most powerful chips belongs to RX 6700 XT, which is owned by 0.11% of users surveyed in the Steam Hardware Survey. All in all, this translates into a mere 0.34% share of Radeon 6000s in the total number of surveyed users. Nvidia definitely has more reason to be happy, as their flagship GeForce RTX 3090 is owned by 0.38% of the participants in the latest survey, which is a larger share than all 6000-series Radeons combined. However, the most popular representative of Ampere from Nvidia is the GeForce RTX 3070, which is owned by 1.58% of respondents. According to estimates, there may be as much as 4.5 million owners of RTX 3000 series cards on Steam, which is a surprisingly good result, taking into account their limited availability and high prices.
These numbers should not be analyzed in terms of the actual division on the market, but they can still show what the majority of Steam users are using. Perhaps these proportions will change when the next generation GPUs are released. According to the latest information, they are expected to bring high performance gains, but at the same time will require powerful power supplies.
What does the PC of a typical Steam user look like? It is a unit equipped with a 4-core Intel processor clocked at 3.3-3.69 GHz, as well as at least 16 GB of RAM. The most popular GPU is the aged GeForce GTX 1060, which launched 5 years ago.
The long-standing poor availability of graphics cards has a significant impact on the preferences of gamers. It seems that Nvidia's decision to enter into cooperation with Samsung turned out to be a bullseye. Despite having a worse technological process than TSMC, the South Korean manufacturer could focus on producing chips for Nvidia. The Taiwanese company had to meet the whims of more contractors, resulting in the opening of new factories to meet the ever-increasing demand for chips. Nevertheless, the latest Steam Hardware Survey results clearly show that AMD must continue to fight for customers who are increasingly choosing competitive chips.
