Watch out Nvidia – AMD RX 6700 XT becomes first Big Navi card to rank in Steam’s top GPUs

AMD’s Big Navi graphics cards have ranked in the GPU section of Steam’s hardware survey for the first time ever, in what could be a tentative indication that sales – or perhaps more to the point, stock – of the latest RX 6000 series cards are picking up a bit.

Let’s come back to analyzing what that might mean shortly, but it’s certainly interesting to see one of Team Red’s RDNA 2 GPUs finally making its way onto the graphics card rankings for the September hardware report that Valve compiles based on the Steam user base.

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To be precise, it’s the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT which makes the cut, but only by the thinnest of margins, registering a 0.16% share among Steam gamers. The very bottom of the table is propped up by GPUs on 0.15%, so you can see that the 6700 XT only just sneaked above these. On Nvidia’s side, it’s level pegging with the GeForce RTX 3050 Ti which is on 0.16% too.

Nvidia is dominant in the GPU arena, of course, and even AMD’s top-ranked graphics card, the Radeon RX 580, only holds a 1.65% share, putting it in 12th position. All 11 cards above that are Nvidia models, with Ampere’s RTX 3070 actually placing just ahead of the RX 580 in 11th position (1.69%).

The most popular graphics card with Steam gamers currently is the GTX 1060 (with an 8.64% share), according to the latest survey.

Analysis: Could the RX 6600 XT make bigger inroads?

The appearance of an RX 6000 series card in the Steam hardware survey is a big thing because it’s the very first time that Big Navi has managed to claw its way onto the GPU rankings as mentioned – bearing in mind that these cards have had a long time to make some waves (launching almost a year ago now).

What’s even more interesting is that the GPU to make its mark is a more recently deployed RDNA 2 model, as the 6700 XT was released in March, so has had less time to make an impact – but may have been produced in somewhat greater numbers, we can but guess. That wouldn’t be too difficult given some of the well-documented supply issues around the RX 6800 models and 6900 XT.

We’ve certainly been hearing some more positive things about stock levels with the latest RX 6600 XT card, as you may have seen, and we might see this make more of a mark than the 6700 XT – it’s very new to the scene, of course, having emerged in August, so it’ll take time to register greater sales numbers, no doubt. So, in the big picture, Nvidia may have a little cause for concern here on its rival’s cards, even if a 0.16% share for one Big Navi product is hardly an immediate worry.

Finally, we should remember to take the 6700 XT GPU’s apparent small victory here with some caution, particularly when such a small percentage of market share is involved at the bottom of the graphics card table. The gains of the 6700 XT could to some extent be a reflection of changes in the gamers who are involved in the Steam survey (it’s not a constant group of the same PCs covered, as participation is optional, and therefore those taking part will change from month-to-month).

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Via PC Gamer