AMD has managed to craft some genuinely competitive components with its latest graphics cards, with the RX 7800 XT in particular offering terrific value. However, despite the company’s best efforts, Nvidia’s offerings continue to be the preferred choice among Steam users, with the RTX 4090 now proving more popular on the platform than any Radeon card.
As the best graphics card around in terms of performance, it’s not hard to understand why the RTX 4090 has proven so popular among the Steam users that can afford it. What is remarkable, however, is that Nvidia has managed to carve out more market share with this $1,600 card than any competition option from AMD.
This damning state of affairs for AMD has come to light following PCGamesN’s analysis of the Steam Hardware Survey (February 2024). According to Valve, the RTX 4090 makes up 0.88% of all graphics cards on its platform, while the most popular pixel pusher from AMD, the almost seven-year old RX 580, clocks in at 0.83%.
While the generic listings of ‘AMD Radeon Graphics’ and ‘AMD Radeon(TM) Graphics’ make up a combined 2.75%, these aren’t referring to discrete graphics cards and instead describe iGPUs you’ll find in laptop and some desktop CPUs. You can see the similar entries from Intel with ‘Intel Iris Xe Graphics’ and ‘Intel (R) UHD Graphics’.
Things don’t get much better the closer you look, either. Save for the 0.15% growth in ‘AMD Radeon Graphics (RADV VANGOGH)’ (a.k.a. the Steam Deck), the popularity of every single AMD GPU in the Steam Hardware survey has either declined or stagnated.
Even with countless discounts and new releases in the Radeon RX 7000 series, the only current generation AMD graphics card to make the list is the RX 7900 XTX with a share of 0.34%. Meanwhile, every RTX 40 series card save for the RTX 4080 and recently release Super variants prove more popular than AMD’s champion, the RX 580.
These statistics are pretty dire but aren’t entirely surprising as the advantages of DLSS 3 and class-leading ray tracing performance continue to be powerful draws for anyone looking for a current generation graphics card, despite Nvidia’s generally higher prices. Still, it is depressing to see the likes of the RX 7800 XT not get their flowers while the RTX 4060 Ti enjoys a baffling 1.72% market share.
Research from analyst firm Jon Peddie Research says AMD has increased its share in the graphics card by 7% year-on-year, but it’s clear that there’s much to be done before we see Radeon populate the space in the same way GeForce does. Whether RDNA 4 GPUs can catapult the company’s fortunes forward is anyone’s guess at this point, but the optimist in me remains hopeful of increase competition.