Valve now reports that the RX 7900 XTX is first AMD graphics card of the current generation to grace the Steam hardware survey. However, despite it making the cut over nine months after its release back in December 2022, its market share is still low.
In fact, AMD’s graphics cards only take up 8.68% of Steam gamers, according to PC Gamer, though that number only includes AMD discrete cards which excludes integrated cards. If you include AMD cards that could have been grouped together in the 10.69% ‘Other’ category, then that would mean AMD has about a 10% share at best. Meanwhile, Nvidia holds a massive 75% market share of cards registered with Steam.
Keep in mind that, while the Steam hardware survey is a very useful guide, it’s not perfect since it isn’t a fully controlled and adjusted survey. For instance, PC Gamer recounted a past incident in which the number of RTX 3060 owners jumped to “10% of users in April before returning to a more plausible 4.66% in May.”
AMD may be in trouble
Considering that the AMD RX 7900 XTX is one of the best graphics cards on the market right now, it’s little surprise that it made it on the survey. But the fact that it’s not in the top spot (that honor goes to a generic ‘AMD Radeon Graphics’ entry, which likely covers integrated GPUs) coupled with the low market percentage shows how long of a way to go AMD has to be properly competitive with Nvidia.
However, looking at Nvidia’s recent focus shift to the AI market, along with its middling sales for the 8GB RTX 4060 Ti and the shadow drop of the 16GB RTX 4060 Ti, it seems that Team Green could possibly be giving Team Red a chance to squeeze in with its own offerings. There’s also the fact that the AI craze could cause GPU shortages which, if AMD takes advantage of it, could capitalize on it by having more supply than Nvidia.
There’s also the fact that the RX 7900 XTX has overheating issues that have been hitting some of its reference cards, though third-party cards wouldn't be affected by this.
Regardless, AMD needs to think of a proper strategy in order to tackle its lack of market share. Nvidia, despite its current repositioning and troubles, is still beating AMD by a landslide and Team Red needs a solid strategy to combat that massive lead.
