Steam Paints A Different Picture Of Intel, AMD, And Nvidia

[Scotter97]

Source: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4086817-steam-paints-different-picture-intel-amd-nvidia

Source: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

 

Even though this article isn't written by the most tech savvy person, I still found it interesting to read through.  I am hesitant to believe Intel regained some of the user space (CPU wise) with recent events.  I am not surprised that nVidia is reclaiming user share (since new AMD cards are hard to get right now at a reasonable price).

 

It wasn't included in the original article, but I included Steam's "Most Popular Hardware" list as well.  I think its cool to see what is most common between all of the different builds.

 

Quote

Although Steam addresses only a segment of PC users, it's a very important battleground currently for Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD), and Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA). PC gaming is the one segment of the PC desktop market that appears to be growing, and it tends to emphasize high-end desktop use.

Quote

 

AMD's current Ryzen processors, as well as its forthcoming Threadripper, clearly target the gaming/enthusiast market. Likewise, Intel's latest Skylake-X processors appear to be the company's attempt to counter Ryzen by providing even more performance, albeit at the cost of high power consumption.

 

Quote

Nvidia and AMD compete in desktop graphics cards oriented towards gamers. Although Nvidia has branched out into machine learning and autonomous vehicles, gaming GPUs are still its most important source of revenue. In the company's most recent fiscal quarter, gaming was 53% of its $1.937 billion in revenue. Nvidia is currently considered dominant in high-end desktop GPUs, but that may change with the arrival of AMD's Vega architecture, which is thought to be equivalent to Nvidia's current high-end Pascal architecture GPUs.

As for AMD Vega, I will believe it when I see it IRL.

Quote

So, Steam has its finger on the pulse of a key market for all three companies, and therefore, its monthly survey of the computer hardware and software that its customers use is probably a good indicator of the state of the PC gaming market.

[tom_w141]

Take the survey with a pinch of salt its opt in and steam has never asked me to. So my results and likely many others are not included.

[Morgan MLGman]

I've seen those scores a few days ago, they're very weird because it's simply impossible for Intel to gain marketshare for the past few months since Ryzen became so popular, even looking here at our forum, there's so many new Ryzen builders...

 

LTT also had a video on how often people buy Ryzen compared to Intel recently and Ryzen goes up & up in sales.

 

Take that info with a huge grain of salt.

[Scotter97]

Just now, tom_w141 said:

Take the survey with a pinch of salt its opt in and steam has never asked me to. So my results and likely many others are not included.

I agree.  The article states how many people use steam, but it didn't mention how many actually took the survey.  I also just attached the photos to go with.

[zMeul]

10 minutes ago, Morgan MLGman said:

I've seen those scores a few days ago, they're very weird because it's simply impossible for Intel to gain marketshare for the past few months since Ryzen became so popular, even looking here at our forum, there's so many new Ryzen builders...

that's not how it works

AMD has already a small market share CPU wise

and for AMD to surpass Intel in overall market share they would've needed not only to sell shit ton more than they usually do, they would've needed to sell more than Intel sold for years - and that is just not possible since Ryzen launched, 3-4 months was it

[samcool55]

Don't forget all those RX 480-580-570 cards that are sold to miners won't appear in the steam survey, but they are all gone.

I think things will only change when ryzen and the APU versions appear in pc's and laptops you can buy in your local electronics store.

[porina]

5 minutes ago, Morgan MLGman said:

I've seen those scores a few days ago, they're very weird because it's simply impossible for Intel to gain marketshare for the past few months since Ryzen became so popular, even looking here at our forum, there's so many new Ryzen builders...

We don't have the detail, but it isn't impossible for some scenarios where Intel fight back. For example, high end PC VR is often stated as having strong initial sales, but once everyone who's going to get one has got it, sales fall off a cliff. Not saying that's happening with Ryzen, but it is a possibility that after an initial rush when it was the new thing, sales have dropped once again and ongoing sales slowed down. If you can say not to take the Steam Survey results too seriously, you can't rely on LTT forum posts as any indicator either.

5 minutes ago, Morgan MLGman said:

Take that info with a huge grain of salt.

If you don't mind, I like my salt grains small, but I do literally have a bucket of it.

[Scotter97]

1 minute ago, samcool55 said:

Don't forget all those RX 480-580-570 cards that are sold to miners won't appear in the steam survey, but they are all gone.

I think things will only change when ryzen and the APU versions appear in pc's and laptops you can buy in your local electronics store.

Just wait, ebay and craigslist will be full of those RX cards when this mining phase comes to a close.  MANY near death cards. (lol)

[samcool55]

Just now, Scotter97 said:

Just wait, ebay and craigslist will be full of those RX cards when this mining phase comes to a close.  MANY near death cards. (lol)

Probably, but when?

It might be months or even years until that happens and until then those cards won't appear in the steam survey.

And even if it does happen and they do start to appear on ebay and whatever we probably won't see a correct marketshare from steam, they probably changed gpu's then...

[DrMikeNZ]

13 minutes ago, tom_w141 said:

Take the survey with a pinch of salt its opt in and steam has never asked me to. So my results and likely many others are not included.

Surveys with limited information are pointless. Although 19% AMD seems close to me, only 16.7% of my computers have an AMD processor.

I was asked to take the survey while I was on my laptop, which is by no means representative of all of my systems.

[Morgan MLGman]

4 minutes ago, zMeul said:

that's not how it works

AMD has already a small market share CPU wise

and for AMD to surpass Intel in overall market share they would've needed not only to sell shit ton more than they usually do, they would've needed to sell more than Intel sold for years - and that is just not possible since Ryzen launched, 3-4 months was it

I didn't mean that AMD will have a higher marketshare, I meant that Intel shouldn't really gain any once Ryzen launched considering AMDs previous CPU sales pre-Ryzen era...

[Mr.Meerkat]

12 minutes ago, zMeul said:

that's not how it works

AMD has already a small market share CPU wise

and for AMD to surpass Intel in overall market share they would've needed not only to sell shit ton more than they usually do, they would've needed to sell more than Intel sold for years - and that is just not possible since Ryzen launched, 3-4 months was it

And in order for Intel to gain market share, they would need to sell more than they usually do/have been selling so...technically you're not quite right  

I mean if intel sold 3 CPUs for every single AMD CPU sold (as an example), the market share will always be 75/25%. Even after an infinite amount of years and CPUs sold, the market share will always be 75/25%.

[DrMikeNZ]

1 minute ago, Morgan MLGman said:

I didn't mean that AMD will have a higher marketshare, I meant that Intel shouldn't really gain any once Ryzen launched considering AMDs previous CPU sales pre-Ryzen era...

People upgrading from old AMD system to Ryzen, the old system is discarded. No net gain in market share.

People upgrading from Intel sidegrade and sell their old system, and the old system is still in use by someone else.

Meanwhile Intel continues to sell new processors while businesses flood the second hand market with used Intel prebuilts.

[desertcomputer]

22 minutes ago, tom_w141 said:

Take the survey with a pinch of salt its opt in and steam has never asked me to. So my results and likely many others are not included.

Plus it quite easy to mass fake hardware ids with VM i presume. 

[Morgan MLGman]

1 minute ago, DrMikeNZ said:

People upgrading from old AMD system to Ryzen, the old system is discarded. No net gain in market share.

People upgrading from Intel sidegrade and sell their old system, and the old system is still in use by someone else.

Meanwhile Intel continues to sell new processors while businesses flood the second hand market with used Intel prebuilts.

Though I don't understand why people wouldn't use older AMD systems? They're not high-end, but they're not bad either so I guess your argument goes both ways.

[DrMikeNZ]

2 minutes ago, MrUnknownEMC said:

Plus it quite easy to mass fake hardware ids with VM i presume. 

As far as I am aware, Steam randomly picks users to take the survey. It requires a few manual clicks (which could theoretically be automated), although you might only get one request per VM every couple of years. You would need to create millions of these VM's for this purpose to skew the results, and I am sure steam has a decent detection algorithm to notice unusual behaviour like that.

2 minutes ago, Morgan MLGman said:

Though I don't understand why people wouldn't use older AMD systems? They're not high-end, but they're not bad either so I guess your argument goes both ways.

While they are low end, they are still decent processors in the right workload, and I would expect many to continue using them for gaming.

It is more likely though that those older AMD systems are getting used for non-gaming tasks (NAS etc), and no longer running steam.

[LAwLz]

39 minutes ago, tom_w141 said:

Take the survey with a pinch of salt its opt in and steam has never asked me to. So my results and likely many others are not included.

That should not have a statistical significance since users from all camps will be skipped roughly equally.

 

 

38 minutes ago, Morgan MLGman said:

I've seen those scores a few days ago, they're very weird because it's simply impossible for Intel to gain marketshare for the past few months since Ryzen became so popular, even looking here at our forum, there's so many new Ryzen builders...

It's far from impossible.

Yes, on this forum (which is heavily AMD biased) and for people who build PCs at home Ryzen is popular. But what you are not factoring in is that Intel is by far the most dominant player in both prebuilt, laptops and custom builds.

 

 

Let's be real here. Here are the statistics from amazon's best seller page. Of course you can argue all you want about how wrong Amazon is, but it should be a good rough indicator of what people are actually buying.

 

CPUs:

Intel is both the first and second most sold processor. AMD comes in at spot 3, 4 and 5, then it's back to Intel again.

It's hard to say how big the difference between first second and third place are, but the fact remains that Intel still has the two most sold processors (and this is for the home building crowd).

 

Prebuilt desktops:

AMD shows up in 6th place, and then again at 17th place. 17 of the 20 most sold computers on Amazon are Intel based. The remaining 3 consist of 2 AMD computers, and one ARM based computer.

 

Laptops:

AMD is not anywhere near the top selling laptops.

Even if we completely discard all Chromebooks (which are mostly Intel based), the first AMD laptop is in 5th place and there is only a total of 3 AMD laptops in the top 20 most sold laptops. Intel has 9 (plus Chromebooks).

 

By the way, let's throw in graphics cards as well:

AMD doesn't appear until number 47.

Number 1 to 46 are all Nvidia cards (except one SLI bridge, and one PSU that randomly appears in the list).

 

 

People who think AMD are regaining market share are living in a bubble and doesn't know what the real world is like.

 

I am hoping that AMD regains market share and makes more money as well. A strong AMD will benefit us customers. But I am not going to be delusional and pretend like AMD is doing better than they actually are. Right now, AMD processors are only appealing to one subgroup of a subgroup. They are appealing to people who build their own computers (which is a very small minority). But even in that group they are not the first choice, and not even the second choice at the time of writing.

 

And before people say I am an AMD hater. I am not. I am just giving this forum a well needed reality check.

[desertcomputer]

Just now, DrMikeNZ said:

As far as I am aware, Steam randomly picks users to take the survey. It requires a few manual clicks (which could theoretically be automated), although you might only get one request per VM every couple of years. You would need to create millions of these VM's for this purpose to skew the results, and I am sure steam has a decent detection algorithm to notice unusual behaviour like that.

While they are low end, they are still decent processors in the right workload, and I would expect many to continue using them for gaming.

It is more likely though that those older AMD systems are getting used for non-gaming tasks (NAS etc), and no longer running steam.

I get the steam survey every time i login into new computer for the first time and every reinstall. 

[Scionyde]

Clearly, GabeN is a shill for Intel/Nvidia. /s

[tom_w141]

32 minutes ago, zMeul said:

that's not how it works

AMD has already a small market share CPU wise

and for AMD to surpass Intel in overall market share they would've needed not only to sell shit ton more than they usually do, they would've needed to sell more than Intel sold for years - and that is just not possible since Ryzen launched, 3-4 months was it

Sometime I wonder if you read threads before replying.

 

He said Intel's market share should not have increased from where it already was due to how well Ryzen is selling. NO ONE SAID ANYTHING ABOUT SURPASSING INTEL IN TOTAL MARKET SHARE <- You just zMeul'd that one up yourself. Also yes you are now a verb.

[Gravesnear]

I guess this explains why Nvidia enabled DX12 on Fermi cards after June. Trying to obfuscate usage share of newer cards once Vega launches since the sorting is done by API support. Not even wearing a tinfoil hat for this one, considering in the recent past they stated would no longer be supporting cards older than the 600 series. Since the number for the next survey - which will include Vega - will be for June to December, Nvidia should get a (albeit modest) bump in usage share among DX12 cards from these Fermi models. Kind of genius.

 

Edit: also a massive stretch

Edited July 11, 2017 by Gravesnear
Retraction

[Ordinarily_Greater]

4 CPUs? I assume that is cores (you know it) but did they ask or steal computer information?

[LAwLz]

15 minutes ago, Gravesnear said:

I guess this explains why Nvidia enabled DX12 on Fermi cards after June. Trying to obfuscate usage share of newer cards once Vega launches since the sorting is done by API support. Not even wearing a tinfoil hat for this one, considering in the recent past they stated would no longer be supporting cards older than the 600 series. Since the number for the next survey - which will include Vega - will be for June to December, Nvidia should get a (albeit modest) bump in usage share among DX12 cards from these Fermi models. Kind of genius.

Love the conspiracy theory, but that's not how the Steam hardware survey works. The video card usage graph does not factor in the DirectX version the cards support.

 

You can get that info if you dig deeper into the statistics, but the PC Video Card Usage on the front page does not factor it in. If it did then Intel would be at less than 6% market share.

 

Also, if you think Nvidia spent the time and effort to enable DirectX12 on Fermi just so that their Steam survey statistics, which only shows up if you go into the "more info" page and manually summarize the list of graphics cards, would go up then you're quite delusional.

Especially since Fermi has such a low market share that it doesn't even show up in the detailed list of video card usage. 0 Fermi cards appear because their market share is too low, and only two Kepler cards appear (550 Ti and 560), and they total a whopping 1.1% of all cards in the survey. But yeah, I'm totally with you that Nvidia did it just so that they could increase their market share.

 

Thanks for the good laugh though. It's always fun reading what inane comments people post in AMD vs Nvidia/Intel threads. It's like looking through a portal to a whole different dimension where logic ceased to exist.

 

 

19 minutes ago, Ordinarily_Greater said:

4 CPUs? I assume that is cores (you know it) but did they ask or steal computer information?

Yes, 4 CPUs means 4 cores.

You get asked if you want to participate in the survey, then you need to click next a few times.

[tom_w141]

2 minutes ago, Sampsy said:

I've probably been asked about 10+ times on various devices. But note that includes the desktop that I use for gaming as well as my laptop and surface which are never used for gaming. 

 

I have seen many people use the steam hardware survey to say things like "most gamers are using 2 core CPUs" not realising many results may be from devices not intended for gaming. 

Never been asked on any PC ever

[NvidiaIntelAMDLoveTriangle]

1 hour ago, tom_w141 said:

Take the survey with a pinch of salt its opt in and steam has never asked me to. So my results and likely many others are not included.

Wasn't steam taking the information from all its users without any questions?

I remember reading somewhere some years ago, that steam their surveys are just collected data from everyone who uses steam, and no questions asked of its users.