AMD has made great strides in recent years under the leadership of Lisa Su, and ZEN architecture processors have played a major role in this. As the largest game distribution platform for its user base, AMD CPUs in Steam climbed to 26.9 percent in the November hardware survey.
Valve presented the latest hardware and software survey on the Steam platform, revealing some interesting details about the CPU and GPU market. According to the survey, 26.9% of Steam users are running an AMD processor.
The coming year 2021 is a special year in which the popularity of new crowns will lead to a huge increase in demand for PC hardware, with AMD ZEN 3 playing a major role. Intel is still struggling with the 10nm and smaller process nodes, and it does not seem likely to take the lead in the near future. The 11th generation of Rocket Lake processors, which will be launched early next year, will still use the 14nm process, and the following year AMD may accelerate the pace to the 5nm Zen 4 architecture. While Intel’s teaser states that Rocket Lake will deliver double-digit IPC performance growth, total power consumption will be higher as it is still at 14 nm.
To put things in perspective: In November 2016, 21.5% of Steam users were using an AMD CPU, which means that the red team continues to expand its presence in gaming computers.
However, things don’t look so good for AMD when it comes to graphics cards. In November 2016, 23.4% of Steam respondents used a corporate GPU. By 2020, however, only 16.5% of Valve platform users will have one. It will be interesting to see if things will change after AMD releases its new RX 6000 series graphics cards.
It will also be interesting to see the differences in CPU configurations in Steam. In recent years the percentage of users with processors with more than four cores has increased significantly. In 2016 this percentage was only 4.5%, and in 2020 it will be 35%.
As we saw a few months ago, the NVIDIA GTX 1060 graphics card remains the most popular with 10.2% of all GPUs. Moreover, the most popular resolution is 1080p with 66.2% and 43.2% of gamers have 16 GB of RAM.
You can view and explore the full Steam hardware and software survey results here.