Seven months after its release, AMD's Radeon RX 6700 XT has finally made it into the Steam Hardware Survey with a 0.16% market share. That puts it right next to the RTX 3050 Ti (laptop GPU) and RX 5700. This is a new milestone for AMD since it's the first time one of its RX 6000 series GPUs has made it to the main Steam video cards survey page, reaching the required 0.15% to be on the charts.
It's good to finally see an RDNA2 architecture card finally reach a new level of popularity on the Steam survey, despite the lengthy time it has taken for the 6700 XT, one of AMD's best graphics cards, to get into people's hands. It's no secret that AMD has struggled to produce the RX 6000 series cards in any meaningful numbers, to the point that Nvidia was outselling AMD's RDNA2 cards by a factor of 11 to 1.
As for other RX 6000 series cards, the RX 6600 XT may show up a bit quicker, given its lower pricing and apparently higher availability, but the Navi 21 GPUs (RX 6800 and above) will take some time to reach the main charts. AMD's Radeon RX 6800 XT is the second most popular RDNA2 card according to Steam's DirectX/Vulkan hardware survey, but it's still not popular enough to be on the video card survey.
The DirectX/Vulkan survey provides finer grained detail, though there's some wonkiness with the numbers — Vulkan sums to over 190%, while the other DirectX APIs only sum to 84–95%, depending on the month. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Still, it gives us an idea of where AMD's less popular GPUs sit relative to Nvidia's counterparts.
If we look at the DirectX 12 chart, the RX 6800 XT reaches a 0.11% market share in all, right underneath that is the RX 6900 XT with 0.10% of market share, and the RX 6800 sits at just 0.05% market share. For comparison, Nvidia's RTX 3090 sits at 0.42% market share in the same category, the RTX 3080 reaches an even higher 0.99%, and the RTX 3080 Ti already has 0.26% despite being released just a few months ago.
Perhaps more telling, summing all the RX 6000-series GPUs from the DX12 API list gives just 0.43% of the total, while the RTX 30-series manages to claim 7.96%. Based off those figures, Ampere GPUs have outsold RDNA2 GPUs among surveyed Steam users by a ratio of more than 18 to 1. How many GPUs ended up in the hands of cryptocurrency miners is a different matter.
AMD CPUs up to 30% Market Share
In contrast to the GPU numbers, AMD looks much better this month on the Steam CPU survey side of the fence. AMD accounts for 30.3% of the market share, which is the highest amount of market coverage AMD has seen in years, thanks no doubt to its latest and greatest Zen 3 architecture, which powers many of the best CPUs for gaming.
There was an interesting bounce back after last month, where AMD's share fell to 27.31%, so there's definitely some variability in the numbers. That's good to see, because any statistical survey should show variation, and we see that on the CPU side — the GPU side, not so much (not at all, really). So as usual, we need to mention that Valve has never published full details of how these surveys are conducted, and while we can hope they're done with proper statistical methods, we don't actually know for certain if that's the case.
Obviously, the video card shortages continue to be a problem, along with other supply constraints. AMD and Nvidia would both love to be making and selling more GPUs, but TSMC and Samsung Foundry are basically tapped out on production. Hopefully once new fabs become operational, we'll see greater availability of future products.
