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Latest Steam Hardware Survey shows big changes after Valve fixes counting
AmazingAvery
Age of Conan AdvocateMember UncommonPosts: 7,188
in Hardware
via techreport - https://techreport.com/news/33604/steam-hardware-survey-shows-big-changes-after-valve-fixes-counting
The latest round of stats has some pretty big changes, but the wildest swings probably come from a correction in the way Steam counts internet café machines operated by many users. As it turns out, the last few months of stats may not have been entirely reliable.
Als0 - https://www.pcgamer.com/valve-fixes-steam-hardware-survey-windows-10-is-back-on-top/
The March 2018 survey (via the Wayback Machine) indicated that 57 percent of Steam users were using Windows 7 64-bit, followed by 36 percent on Windows 10 64-bit. The current survey basically flips those numbers: Windows 10 64-bit is back on top at 53 percent, while Windows 7 is back in second place at 36 percent.
As one poster wrote:
AMD is in a way scary position. Despite having being used in nearly 15% of systems running Steam, this is all the usage of the current gen cards on the list (excluding the vanishingly small quantities lumped into the "other" category)
RX480 0.63%
RX460 0.44%
RX580 0.29%
RX470 0.24%
RX560 0.19%
for a grand total of 1.79% which is somewhat less than the less-than-venerable older NVidia GTX950 which I raise merely as a mediocre comparison point. Much less the mighty GTX1060 at 12.29% all by itself. So, most AMD GPUs used are old legacy things.
RX480 0.63%
RX460 0.44%
RX580 0.29%
RX470 0.24%
RX560 0.19%
for a grand total of 1.79% which is somewhat less than the less-than-venerable older NVidia GTX950 which I raise merely as a mediocre comparison point. Much less the mighty GTX1060 at 12.29% all by itself. So, most AMD GPUs used are old legacy things.
Totally bewildering the low gaming market share of AMD through Steam. The RX 580 hasn't even cracked 1%. It's quite plausible to think that most of the graphics cards they sell get used for mining crypto-currency.
Comments
The last time i upgraded gpus i went from HD Radeon 6950 to a GTX 970. I made the switch just to use PhysX and shadowplay. But now i have issues whenever a game goes above 3.5gb of use on my 4gb card. That 3.5gb debacle is haunting me now and i regret that purchase.
PhysX doesn't make a huge difference and i never use shadowplay, and ironically enough i had nvidia driver issues a couple of times.
They are still the popular kid on the block so most people will stick with them, but my next gpu will probably be AMD again. I had no reason to change other than curiosity. I'll use whatever gives me best performance for less money. NVidia is a monopoly and i don't like that.
My thoughts.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
AMD is the Nintendo of the PC world, the competition is always ahead of them but they are the technology innovators.
Personally I chose graphics card solely on performance and budget. I know what kind of games I play and it is still 1080p. For this I don't care about brand for CPU and GPU. I go either brand , whatever is most practical at time of purchase.
I also find it very important that both brands have their place in the current graphics cards market. If only because their competition will be a good thing for us customers in the long run.
The only bias I have atm is for linux support. I find this important, because I want competition here too. As gaming platform I want linux to become a viable alternative for Windows. I hate monopolies. With a monopoly, manufacturers stop listening to what customers want. So you get stupid shit like Windows Home that minimizes your game to tell you that there is an update waiting and resets a lot of personal settings when updating (this is seriously bad programming or complete disregard of customer).
I bought Win 10 Pro (for my gaming pc anyway) just because I hate Microsoft telling me what to do. I hate an OS that does not give you complete control.
Current AMD cards have an edge when it comes to crypto mining which impacts like for like price - and price will almost certainly have an impact.
In the case of the Steam hardware survey, at one recent point, about 60% of players had Chinese as their primary language. Those were overwhelmingly people playing PUBG at Internet cafes in China, and those Internet cafes overwhelmingly used Nvidia GPUs. You can see a spike in the data where that happened.
Ever since 2012, if you compare gaming performance to compute (including but not limited to mining), AMD GPUs have been relatively better at compute, while Nvidia have been relatively better at gaming. That has been consistent as a comparative advantage, though the absolute advantage varied. For example, the Radeon R9 290X was about even with the original Titan in gaming, but massively better than it at compute. Today, the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is much better than a Radeon RX Vega 64 at gaming, but about even at compute.
This is also why, whenever a game uses a lot of compute (at least other than something proprietary to Nvidia), it ends up being a pro-AMD outlier in results. If most games used a ton of GPU compute, we'd think of the Radeon RX Vega 64 and GeForce GTX 1080 Ti as being fairly close at gaming, but the games that used the GPU only for graphics as pro-Nvidia outliers. But that's not the case now and probably never will be.
When most people buying consumer GPUs are buying them for gaming, prices end up being driven by gaming and the Radeon GPU being better at compute is just a minor bonus that most purchasers don't care about.
When most people buying consumer GPUs are buying them for mining, then compute drives the prices. That happened for a few months in 2011 and 2014, but has been going on for pretty much entirely the last year now. With miners buying up GPUs and forcing price hikes such that an Nvidia GPU and an AMD GPU that are equivalent at mining will be the same price, gamers get better performance for their money buy buying Nvidia.
If consumers are buying GeForce GPUs using CUDA as a reason and aren't going to use it to run CUDA code written by (or at least paid for by) Nvidia, then that's a case of "a fool and his money are soon parted".
CUDA is great for writing Hello World, but is a hot mess of an API that really doesn't work very well for writing anything substantially more complicated than that. The reason it gets used a lot in some quarters is that Nvidia writes and hires others to write some libraries in CUDA so that they can't run on anything other than Nvidia GPUs. If your purpose in buying a GPU is to run CUDA code already written by Nvidia and you're not going to write your own compute code, then buying an Nvidia GPU makes sense. If you have to write your own compute code, then you'd be crazy to use CUDA.
Reporter: What's behind Blizzard success, and how do you make your gamers happy?
Blizzard Boss: Making gamers happy is not my concern, making money.. yes!