NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3090 flagship reigns supreme over AMD’s entire Radeon RX 6000 RDNA 2 graphics card lineup in terms of overall share within the Steam hardware survey. While the data base is not indicative of actual market share, it does show that only 1 out of 14 gamers has AMD Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards installed inside his PC while the rest are running NVIDIA’s latest Ampere GeForce RTX GPUs.
More Gamers Are Running An NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Ampere Graphics Card Than AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 Series According To Steam’s Hardware Survey
For some time now, AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards weren’t showing up within the Steam Hardware Survey but Redditor, Skipan, found a workaround that lists down AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards to see how well they stack up to NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 30 numbers in the database. The workaround requires accessing the share for Vulkan Systems since the DirectX figures for AMD RX 6000 series GPUs were so low compared to NVIDIA Ampere GPUs that they weren’t even showing up. With the new figures in, let’s see how they compare.
They are listed under vulkan systems here https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/directx/
If you compare the shares for vulkan systems vs overall shares listed on https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey you’ll see that all AMD and NVIDIA cards have twice the share under vulkan systems. So just divide by 2 to get the overall share.
6900xt 0.08%
6800xt 0.1%
6800 0.05%
6700xt 0.11%
total 0.34%
via Skipan (r/Hardware)
The AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT flagship has a share of 0.08%, 6800 XT has a share of 0.1%, 6800 has a share of 0.05%, & the recently launched 6700 XT has the highest share of 0.11%. All combined, the entire AMD Radeon RX 6000 series lineup has a share of 0.34%. Now if we compare these numbers to NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards, the RTX 3090 alone has a share of 0.37% (Linux) & that’s a flagship $1500 US card. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 has a share of 0.85%, RTX 3070 sits at 1.53% with the highest market share, & the RTX 3060 series amounts for 1% share. The database hasn’t yet included the RTX 3080 Ti or RTX 3070 Ti.
Looking at the overall share split between NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, the Ampere GeForce RTX 30 series sits at roughly 93.4% while RDNA 2 Radeon RX 6000 series sits at 6.6%. This is a split of 14:1 which means that out of 14 gamers, only one is using an AMD Radeon RX 6000 series graphics card on Steam. Comparing the full Linux share, the Ampere family now amounts to 9.6% of the share & AMD’s RDNA 2 family accounts for 0.68% (including mobile and desktop variants).
AMD & NVIDIA GPU Share (Steam Hardware Survey Linux DB / July 2021)
| NVIDIA Graphics Card | Share | AMD Graphics Card | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| GeForce RTX 3090 | 0.37% | Radeon RX 6900 XT | 0.08% |
| GeForce RTX 3080 Ti | N/A | Radeon RX 6800 XT | 0.10% |
| GeForce RTX 3080 | 0.85% | Radeon RX 6800 | 0.05% |
| GeForce RTX 3070 Ti | N/A | Radeon RX 6700 XT | 0.11% |
| GeForce RTX 3070 | 1.53% | Radeon RX 6600 XT | N/A |
| GeForce RTX 3060 Ti | 0.41% | – | – |
| GeForce RTX 3060 | 0.64% | – | – |
| Total (Desktop GPUs) | 3.80% | Total (Desktop GPUs) | 0.34% |
Once again, these numbers aren’t supposed to be digested as actual market share but they are rather an internal statistic put together by Steam to show what the majority of their userbase is using inside their PCs. Steam has an active user base of over 130 million and hit over 26 million concurrent users in May 2021. To be realistic, both NVIDIA and AMD have had their fair share of trouble to meet the demand but one thing is clear, NVIDIA did have a much bigger stock to offer to gamers than AMD did and even months after launch, you could find an NVIDIA RTX 30 series card while AMD RX 6000 series are harder to find.
The Crypto jump also pushed many gamers to buy NVIDIA RTX 30 series cards over AMD variants and had been mining off their GPUs through mining suites such as NiceHash in their free time. Though not as lucrative as a few months back, these GPUs offer top-notch gaming performance and if they can pay out some of their costs through mining, then why not let gamers have some fun.
The downside is that the same cards have been popular in the mining community and many gamers were deprived of them for months before NVIDIA launched their LHR series which kind of fixes the whole miner’s gobbling-up gaming cards situation. Since then, we have seen prices of graphics cards falling further and availability getting better with analysts claiming a return to normal rates by Q4 2021 or early 2022. We saw in the previous GPU market share report that AMD and NVIDIA retained their actual GPU market share though those numbers comprise last-gen parts.
In the end, AMD and NVIDIA both have some really competitive products in their respective GPU lineup, offering amazing new features to gamers such as FSR, DLSS, and Ray-tracing support but it all boils down to availability and unfortunately, both manufacturers have been unable to keep up with the insane demand, especially AMD.