Although AMD's Ryzen chips were well received when they debuted last year, it seems to have taken some time to filter through to Steam gamers. The same has certainly been the case for its graphics cards, where the 500 series and Vega releases of 2017 almost made no impact on Steam Survey numbers when released. Now though, all of AMD's chickens appear to be coming home to roost, as there are much greater numbers of AMD hardware now appearing on the Valve report.
Although Intel and Nvidia have held dominant positions within their respective PC industries for many years at this point, AMD's influence over the past few waned even further. In Steam surveys of a the last couple of years, AMD's share of the GPU market fell to around 10 percent and the CPU industry wasn't much better. However, in April 2018, that's all changed and part of it might be to do with the way Valve reports on cyber cafes.
A look at the latest Steam hardware survey shows that AMD CPUs can now be found in nearly 16 percent of all gaming systems on Steam. That's a rise of nearly five percent in the past month alone. Although we don't have individual CPU names and numbers from the survey, we can see that the biggest hit to Intel's line came from chips the range from 3.0-3.9 GHz, suggesting older-generations have taken the hit as AMD has gained ground.
Over on the GPU side of things, AMD has increased its share of the market to nearly 15 percent, pushing itself well ahead of Intel's 9.7 percent. Nvidia cards are still more popular across the range, though oddly enough the biggest fall out has come from its insanely popular GTX 1060 graphics cards. The 1050 Ti and 1050 have also lost numbers. The big AMD gainers aren't particularly modern though, with R7 and R5 cards leading the charge, alongside HD 7900 and 7700 cards.
The R580 and RX 560 cards do make an appearance, but it's not an impactful one. There's still no sign of Vega anywhere.
Perhaps that will change soon though, as graphics cards are coming down in price across the board.
