It took some time, but AMD managed to breach a 40% adoption rate on Steam for the first time ever, according to Valve’s latest Steam survey results. It’s not inconceivable that AMD could match or even overtake Intel in Steam usage by this time next year, though caveats abound, including the very nature of these monthly hardware and software surveys.
One thing that is important to keep in mind is these surveys are opt-in and by invitation, rather than being an all-inclusive representation of the entire Steam army. This can and sometimes does shift results, particularly when/if the results are heavily skewed to internet cafes in China.
Still, it remains one of the best resources for analyzing the gaming segment, in terms of hardware and software trends. And in this case, we can see an consistent upward trend in the adoption of AMD processors. The latest survey results show AMD sitting at a 40.39% share of users pinged for the month of July, versus 59.52% for Intel.
At the end of June, the split sat at 39.65% (AMD) and 60.27% (Intel). If going back to March (the furthest back the survey shows without looking hitting up the Wayback Machine), AMD accounted for 37.62% of users surveyed, versus 62.3% for Intel.
Taken at face value, we’re looking at a 2.77% increase for AMD in the span of a few months. Caveats about Steam’s survey data notwithstanding, it’s not hard to believe that AMD would make steady gains and cross the 40% threshold.
For one, AMD is the only one churning consumer processors with stacked 3D V-Cache, which primarily (and almost exclusively) benefit gaming. If you’re building a gaming PC, there’s a good chance you’ve at least considered a 3D V-Cache chip.
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