What simply occurred? The newest Steam Hardware and Software survey has landed with some excellent news for Intel and Nvidia. For the primary time in years, Chipzilla has seen its CPU share amongst contributors enhance for the second month in a row, whereas Ampere playing cards had their finest interval so far.
Watching AMD chip away at Intel’s lead within the survey’s processor part has grow to be an anticipated pattern in latest instances. Team purple hit the 30% mark in May, and whereas there have been a few months the place its share dipped, it all the time bounced again right away. But a -0.04% decline in February and a -0.26% fall in March is the primary time that this author can recall two consecutive months of shrinking person numbers for AMD CPUs. The Ryzen maker is now at 30.66% as Intel attracts nearer to regaining its 70% slice of the pie.
Moving onto GPUs, extra folks began utilizing the GTX 1060 final month (0.19%), cementing its place within the prime spot that it is held since January 2018. However, the RTX 2060 retains respiration down its neck. The Turing card noticed the third-largest positive aspects final month (0.24%), pushing it previous the GTX 1050 Ti and into third place on the principle GPU chart.
March was additionally the perfect month up to now for Ampere playing cards. Six of the highest ten largest gainers had been from Nvidia’s newest RTX 3000 sequence: the RTX 3060 led the pack (up 0.56%), adopted by the RTX 3070. The 3060 Ti, 3080, 3070 Ti, and 3050 made up the remainder of the massive movers. Could this be a mirrored image of graphics playing cards shifting ever nearer to their MSRP as availability improves?
Sadly for AMD, the Radeon RX 6700 XT stays the one RDNA 2 card on the principle chart, because of its 0.23% share. It was up simply 0.01% final month and at present sits between the GT 720M and RX 590 Series.
Elsewhere, Windows 11 continues to slowly however certainly erode Windows 10’s lead with a 1.25% acquire in March, taking it to 16.84%, and 6 is virtually the most typical variety of bodily CPU cores amongst customers, shifting to inside 0.10% of the long-time hottest choice of four-core CPUs. The majority of contributors have 8GB of VRAM of their graphics playing cards, over 1TB of space for storing, and 16GB of RAM, and in case you use a VR headset, it is most likely the Oculus Quest 2.
As all the time, the caveat right here is that participation within the Steam survey is optionally available among the many platform customers, however it does give a superb indication of what {hardware} persons are shopping for and utilizing.
