It's good news for AMD, as the latest Steam hardware survey shows the chipmaker continuing to gain ground on Intel in the battle for supremacy in the gaming CPU market. The July 2025 Steam hardware survey shows AMD pushing above 40% adoption, the best result for AMD in nearly two decades.
Given the recent dominance of AMD CPUs with 3D V-cache, like the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, it's not a surprise to see AMD continuing to grow its market share in the face of Intel's poor competition. The Steam hardware survey is often a great bellwether for how the industry is performing, and at the moment, AMD is right on top, as our best gaming CPU guide shows.
The latest Steam hardware survey for July 2025 shows AMD CPUs with a 40.39% market share, an increase of 0.74% among Steam users compared to June. Intel, in comparison, is down to 59.5%, dropping by an almost equal 0.75%. The Wayback machine shows how stark this reversal in fortunes has been for Intel, with the July 2020 Steam survey showing AMD's adoption among Steam users at the time at just 23.73%.
For those looking at the gaming CPU market in recent years, it's no surprise to see why. AMD has completely changed the game with 3D V-cache CPUs, with those chips including an entirely separate extra cache chip sandwiched on top of or below the main CPU die (depending on the generation of CPU).
This extra cache allows games to store more data on the CPU, reducing the need to retrieve information from RAM, which is much slower. The result is a huge improvement in gaming performance. Intel hasn't so far found a suitable solution to combat these CPUs, with its most recent Intel Core Ultra gaming CPUs failing to impress when it comes to gaming frame rates.
Prior to the introduction of 3D V-cache gaming CPUs, you'd have to go back to the earliest available November 2008 Steam survey via the Wayback machine to see the two chipmakers this close. That survey showed that in July 2008, Intel was at 62.04% adoption, with AMD at 37.95%.
With AMD already beating those numbers, a 50:50 split in market share between Intel and AMD seems likely to be on the cards pretty soon. However, recent Intel CPU rumors show that the company is working on its own 3D V-cache style technology. If Intel is able to finally introduce a suitable alternative, then AMD's success story might begin to change.
For now, however, AMD continues to rule the roost, at least as far as gaming CPUs are concerned. You can check out our AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D review to see why that particular processor with 3D V-cache is our favourite right now for most gamers.
When it comes to GPUs, AMD hasn't had quite such a successful few years as it has with CPUs. However, this month sees the company gain a little ground against Nvidia in that battle. Only back in February this year AMD had dropped to an all-time low 11.6% share of the market but it has since rallied to get to 17.8% this past month, which is its highest percentage in some years.
At least part of that success seems likely to be down to its excellent Radeon RX 9000 series, one example of which you can read about in our AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT review, even though none of those cards make the top 100 individually.
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