News Steam Hardware Survey Shows Big Bump in AMD CPU Popularity

blppt

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Jun 6, 2008
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Well, the X3D is the current king of the hill for gaming, and before that Zen 3 had a decent reign of fastest gaming cpus before the 12 series Cores came out. Not shocking AMD has made gains in gaming.
 
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AgentBirdnest

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Jun 8, 2022
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Wow! If I'm remembering right, the split was somewhere around 10/90 immediately before Zen debuted. Those are impressive gains toward the blue behemoth in just 5 years.
Now step it up and do the same for your graphics department, AMD. : P
 

toooooot

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Aug 2, 2022
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Easy math. I purchased first Zen after a quick research.
Attractive prices, great intergated GPU that you can actually use to play games like Minecraft
 
As usual, these articles are pointless, since the Steam Hardware Survey does not provide stable results from one month to the next.

The last couple paragraphs about operating system usage share should make that very clear. Are we supposed to believe that Mac usage actually dropped from 2.45% down to 1.74% over the course of a single month? That's implying that Steam either lost close to 30% of their Mac users, or that users of other operating systems ballooned by over 40%. Neither option seems all that probable.

Last month's Steam survey article was titled "Gamers Start Embracing Windows 11, According to Steam Data", and focused on how Windows 11 usage share climbed by 1.64 percentage points. This month, usage is shown to be down slightly, while Windows 10 increased by 1.91 percentage points in its place.

Now, we see "Steam Hardware Survey Shows Big Bump in AMD CPU Popularity". Going by their data, the usage share of AMD CPUs among Steam users has fluctuated around the 31-32% range for the better part of the last year. Are we really to believe that it suddenly climbed to 33.5% within several weeks? Again, that seems unlikely. Will the headline next month suggest people are dumping AMD systems if these noisy results show them return to where they were before?

Also, It looks like people are dumping English, as it dropped 2.14 percentage points from the prior month. Some other languages like Japanese saw even larger relative losses. Russian, German, Polish, Turkish, Ukrainian and Latin American Spanish all saw huge gains though. : P

Another amusing statistic... "Steam users with VR Headsets" went up from 1.87% to 6.67% since last month. There are apparently over 3.5 times as many VR headset users on Steam as there were several weeks ago. Why is this not the focus of the article? : P

The numbers in these surveys jump around way too much to make any meaningful analysis of trends from one month to the next. The language data shows that the demographics being surveyed this month vary substantially from last month, so what we are seeing is not a change in the hardware install-base, but rather a change in who Steam decided to send survey requests to this month.