AMD keeps chipping away at Intel in latest Steam survey, more gains for Ampere

In a nutshell: Steam has released its latest monthly hardware & software survey, highlighting the PC setups its customers are using. For February, AMD continued to nibble away at Intel’s CPU share, with team red moving ever closer to 30 percent. Elsewhere, the GTX 1060 remains the top graphics card by far, while the three Ampere cards in the survey continue to make small gains.

AMD has been chipping away at Intel’s once-dominant position in the CPU market for a long time, though the trend reversed in Q4 when Chipzilla gained market share for the first time in three years—mostly due to AMD’s processor shortages. That dip was reflected in December’s Steam survey when AMD saw its first decline in ages. Normality has been restored since then, with the company now taking a 28.51% share after jumping 0.52% last month.

It’s now been over two years since the GTX 1060 replaced the GTX 750 Ti as the top graphics card, and the Pascal product remains number one (9.19%) despite steady declines. Two of the list’s biggest climbers are the GTX 1650 in third and the RTX 2060 in fifth.

Despite the worldwide semiconductor shortage and scalpers ensuring new Ampere cards are almost impossible to find outside of auction sites, three of the line made small gains. The RTX 3080 is the highest entry, up 0.11% to 0.74%, followed by the RTX 3060 Ti (up 0.08% to 0.33%), then the RTX 3090 (up 0.07% to 0.29%). No sign of the RTX 3070 just yet, and the RTX 3060 only launched at the end of February.

The Radeon RX 570 remains AMD’s highest card in eleventh place—still no Radeon RX 6000-series on the list, unsurprisingly.

Elsewhere, the Oculus Quest 2 jumped 5.52% last month to pass the Oculus Rift S as the most popular VR headset; Windows 10 64 bit moved to a 92% share, though Windows 7 saw small gains; and 1920 x 1080 is still the most common primary resolution by far, up 0.59% to 67.29%.