AMD gains a little ground on Steam, But still under PUBG Effect

Steam hardware survey for the month of February is out. According to the statistics, AMD has managed to gain a little ground, however, they are still far from rebounding from decline – presumable caused by the explosion in popularity of PUBG in China.

Latest Steam Hardware Survey shows Slight Increase in AMD’s CPU and GPU share

The latest Steam hardware survey shows AMD’s GPU market share increased slightly from 8.2% in January to 8.9% last month. Nvidia still remains a force to reckon with in the graphics space as nearly 85.3% Steam gamers use its graphics cards.

Nvidia’s GTX 1060 is currently the most popular GPU on Steam as was in the month before, though its share decreased -1.38% in the latest review. The GTX 1060 is followed by the GTX 750 Ti, GTX 960, GTX 1050 Ti, and GTX 950 – all listed in order of popularity.

On the CPU front, AMD also improved slightly by around 1%, reaching a market share of 9.1%. The company is readying to release their second generation Ryzen processors in the coming month, so there is a good chance that they may improve even further.

With that said, the recent increase in market share for team red is in no way going to compensate for what it has lost over the course of past few months. If you aren’t aware, AMD’s CPU and GPU shares on Steam were sitting at 22.8% and 25.1% respectively, in June of last year. However, by the end of November, the shares had plummeted below 10%.

We’re not sure but AMD’s decline on the platform is attributed to the massive increase in popularity of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) in China. As it appears, AMD’s shares fell almost around the same time when Steam saw a surge in the proportion of native Chinese speakers.

A possible conclusion is that the majority of PUBG players from China have systems featuring Nvidia’s mid-range graphics cards. Of course, AMD also offers mid-rangers in the form of Polaris-based cards, but it seems that those cards are more popular among crypto miners than gamers – or at least that is what the latest GPU market report from Jon Peddie Research suggests.

According to the report, GPUs worth over $776 million were sold to miners in 2017, and the one who benefited the most from these sales is AMD. The mining craze also helped the company increase its GPU market share 8.1% in Q4 2017 compared to the previous quarter. You can read the full GPU market report here.