With new PC components being as popular as ever, Steam has given us an insight into the market share of major players in the CPU and GPU gaming markets. According to the Steam Hardware Survey for May 2021, AMD has shown some progress in terms of CPU market share but hasn’t faired so well against Nvidia’s GPUs.
The survey results show that AMD processors reached an all-time high of over 30% market share last month, continuing a trend of steady growth. AMD’s CPU market share is only up by half a percent, but these small gains could have a significant impact in the future. While Intel still dominates with almost 70% market share, AMD is gradually closing the gap thanks to its competitive pricing and high performance CPU offerings.
AMD’s GPUs see a decline in market share
On the other hand, Nvidia GPUs are becoming even more popular among Steam users, with AMD’s market share falling to 16.8%. This could very well be a result of AMD’s supply shortages and stock issues, especially in the case of the RX 6000 series of graphics cards. In addition, the release of the RTX 3080 Ti and 3070 Ti GPUs will almost certainly sway next month’s results in Nvidia’s favor, making it even more difficult for team red to bounce back.
It should be noted that these results are just representative of AMD’s market share in the gaming scene and not the overall CPU and GPU market. As much as we’d like to believe otherwise, there are many uses for PC hardware outside of gaming. Furthermore, only select users who agreed to take part in this study took the Steam hardware survey, not that platform’s entire user base.
The survey also shows the most popular components based on the builds of steam users who decided to opt-in. Surprisingly, the GTX 1080 was the most commonly used GPU despite it being 5 years old at this point. In terms of RAM, over 45% of users have 16 GB of memory, which is probably the most you’ll need for AAA gaming.
