Steam has published the results of its May 2020 Hardware and Software Survey, which compiles information about PC gamers' setups, and the latest results are good news for AMD, and relatively bad news for Intel.
The Steam Hardware and Software Survey is updated every month, and while it only contains information from Steam users who have opted in, the fact that the Steam games store is so popular gives us a good idea of hardware and software trends.
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And current trends seem to show PC gamers are slowly, but surely, switching from Intel to AMD when it comes to processors.
May’s results show that while Intel still has a commanding lead in market share – a whopping 77.54% of all respondents have an Intel CPU – that number dropped 0.74 percentage points from April’s results.
While that drop may not seem huge, Intel should still feel unhappy about this for a number of reasons. First of all, its chief rival, AMD, saw its market share grow by exactly the same amount, which suggests that Intel owners are now switching to AMD.
Another thing to concern Intel is that apart from in March, the company has been losing market share every month of 2020. That’s certainly not a trend that the company will like to see continue, no matter how big its current lead is.
AMD’s GPU struggles
While AMD should take comfort from its growing CPU market share, which has no doubt been boosted by a series of impressive releases recently, on the GPU side, it appears it’s still struggling to make headway.
Its rival in the GPU space, Nvidia, completely dominates the market, with nine out of the top 10 GPUs being cards from team green, with the GTX 1060 being the most-used GPU for Steam users. Meanwhile, the AMD Radeon RX 580 is the only card from team red that manages to sneak into the top ten… and only just, at number 10.
In fact, AMD has just 15.98% GPU market share. Intel, which at the moment doesn’t even make dedicated gaming GPUs, isn’t that far behind on 10.63%.
Interestingly, according to May’s Steam Hardware and Software survey, the overwhelming majority of gamers use gaming monitors running at 1080p resolution (63.51%). The next most popular resolution is the rather low 1,366 x 768 with 10.91% of people using that resolution, which is a common resolution found on laptops.
Meanwhile, 4K (3,840 x 2,160) resolution seems to be struggling to make much of an impact at the moment, with only 2.17% of respondents running that resolution.
As far as software goes, Windows 10 64-bit reigns supreme with it being installed on 85.58% of PCs. However, that’s actually a bit of a drop compared to last month. The second most-used OS remains Windows 7 – and frustratingly for Microsoft, that actually saw a slight rise in use in May (up 0.61%), despite Microsoft ending support for the ageing operating system back in January.
So, it seems like this month’s results are a bit of a mixed bag for AMD and Microsoft, while Nvidia remains relatively secure in its domination of gaming GPU market share. Intel is still CPU king as well, but it will want to do something to stop it losing market share soon.
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