According to the latest Steam Survey, AMD claims that they power 30% of CPUs in gaming PCs. This isn’t exactly surprising news, beyond the fact that it has taken so long to get to this point.
AMD’s Zen 3 chips were launched at the end of 2020, with the likes of the Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 5 5600X both making a huge impact as they were regarded to one some of the best for gaming. Both of those chips were hit with supply problems though and essentially sold out at the start of this year. Though the stock has started to come back, the number of PC’s powered by these chips appears to be on the rise.
Unfortunately, considering the way Steam Hardware Survey actually gathers CPU data means it isn’t the most useful information we will ever get. Tracking models of CPU’s are almost impossible, as the survey stores operating frequencies and the number of cores as different entities. So we can see trends in the number of CPUs cores in these machines, with the biggest uplift in 8-core chips, but getting much more than that from the survey is a difficult task.
When it comes to graphics cards though, things are a bit clearer as we can see which models people are actually purchasing. Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 being the biggest up-tick in laptops, with the rest of Nvidia’s Ampere GPUs also making good inroads.
Interestingly, the mobile GeForce GTX 1060 is suffering the biggest down-tick, as it would indicate that there are plenty of gamers that are upgrading from the generation before last.