News Nvidia's Ampere GPUs Steam Ahead to 1 Percent Bogus Market Share

[Conahl]

A separate program is kind of problematic since such a program will only be run by people who can be bothered to run it. Steam has one of the largest install bases among at least somewhat gaming-oriented stuff.

yea but as Jarred mentioned, unless Valve discloses how and when it gets its info, how reliable is it? thats part of the issue with it

 

[Gurg]

A separate program is kind of problematic since such a program will only be run by people who can be bothered to run it. Steam has one of the largest install bases among at least somewhat gaming-oriented stuff.

Agree . What other company with a large user base would owners allow and trust to survey our PCs and laptops?

I give approval for a few other hardware providers such as MS W, Nvidia, Corsair, Intel, Samsung and MSI to survey my machine but not their competitors. I give approval to Steam because if they had nefarious intent they have plenty of opportunity during a download or long connected gaming session. The only other one independent company would be maybe 3dmark, but it has a limited subscriber base and even among subscribers is used infrequently.

 

[InvalidError]

The only other one independent company would be maybe 3dmark, but it has a limited subscriber base and even among subscribers is used infrequently.

It is used intensively by overclockers and reviewers trying to confirm or improve results, so those results end up grossly over-represented.

 

[scottsoapbox]

Ampere sales could potentially be far higher than the actually bitter people that can't buy them at MSRP would suggest. (I'm not one of those people as I have at least one sample of every new GPU that has been released, for testing purposes.) I hear from these people all the time, and I'm not discounting their experience. I don't have a Microcenter nearby (not even within about 1000 miles), so I don't know what the in-store experience there has been like. I'm certain some people have been able to buy one of the new GPUs there. I'm equally certain that the number of GPUs sold through Microcenter is less than the number sold through Best Buy (official Nvidia partner for Founders Edition), Amazon, and Newegg. Guess which places have been continually out of stock? Best Buy, Amazon, Newegg, and every other online store. Which suggests perhaps the numbers aren't as good as the survey implies, which again gets back to point 5 where I question whether the data was collected via pure random sampling.

1) Ampere sales are as high as they can be because they are selling as fast as they can make them.

2) Stock levels at online retailers suggests NO meaningful data other than #1. Some gamers are buying them with in-stock alerts (I did on Amazon). Many are being purchased by bots. We have NO data on how many bot purchases are direct to miners, how many are resold to miners, and how many are resold to gamers.

Thus, trying to assess the accuracy of the steam survey based on stock levels is an exercise in futility.