AMD's Radeon RX 6600 graphics card ranks ahead of the Polaris-based RX 580 in Steam's latest hardware survey for October, by the narrowest of margins. This makes the RX 6600 the most popular GPU in Steam from Team Red for two months straight, but it still fails to mark Radeon's entry in the top 30 list. As it stands, Nvidia holds 77.37% of the dedicated GPU market with AMD stuck hard at 15% for some time now.
Currently, the RTX 3060 is the most popular GPU on Steam with a 7.46% adoption rate. It is followed by the RTX 4060 mobile and the RTX 4060 desktop, at 5.61% and 5.25% respectively. The RX 6600, in AMD's corner of the ring, is utilized by 0.98% of all Steam users now making it the most widely used graphics card from AMD on Steam. However, this is not impressive by any standard as the RX 6600 comes in at the 34th spot and is almost three years old at this point. We can spot a couple of RTX 40 (Ada Lovelace) GPUs in the top 10 from Nvidia even though this generation was more expensive than RTX 30 (Ampere) and heavily critiqued, yet the most popular RDNA 3 based GPU in this list is the RX 7900 XTX at the 54th spot.
Admittedly, Steam does not encompass the entire PC market but these statistics raise a question, why aren't gamers inclined toward RDNA 3? To be a bit more precise, why was the RX 7600 - the 6600's successor, unable to even secure a spot in this list despite dwindling RX 6600 stock? A large part of that could be attributed to the fact that gamers didn't find any meaningful merits in shifting to RDNA 3. Furthermore, used RX 6600s have flooded the secondhand market and likely most of that supply is a product of the recent GPU mining boom.
Based on our review, the RX 7600 was at best on par with the RX 6600 in terms of cost per frame. But again, the entire GPU survey is dominated by Nvidia - particularly its budget RTX 40 series. The numbers speak for themselves since statistically, gamers tend to favor Nvidia over AMD as 77.37% of users at Steam have opted for a GPU from Nvidia. Thus, it is clear that AMD needs to revise its pricing strategy as the market is in dire need of affordable but capable GPUs; eyeing the forthcoming RX 8000 series.
AMD has announced that it will launch its Radeon RX 8000 (RDNA 4) lineup of graphics cards by early 2025 - hinting towards a CES 2025 reveal. Since Team Red failed to acquire the market share it desired with this generation, the goal for RX 8000 will be high-volume mid-range GPU production which should be fruitful for budget gamers.
