AMD’s RX 6000 Series GPUs Finally Show Up in Steam’s Hardware Survey

In the month of September, AMD CPUs barely had a boost in Steam’s hardware survey but one of their RDNA 2 graphics cards finally had enough users to be included in the top GPU results, this being the first time that an RX 6000 model appears. I am talking about the Radeon RX 6700 XT.

AMD released its Radeon RX 6000 series last November (ten months ago), and the 6700 XT has been on the market (technically) for almost seven months. But so far, RDNA 2 has failed to reap its head in the main GPU chart on Steam, having less than the 0.15% share required to qualify for an acknowledgment.

AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT has 0.16% share in AMD survey

Now the Radeon RX 6700 XT ended September with a 0.16% share among systems that Steam pinged. In reality, the actual engagement among Steam users may not have moved at all, and this is a reflection of Steam auditing a different set of systems. As the survey page notes, “participation is optional and anonymous.”

Still, Steam’s monthly survey is arguably the best way to find out what hardware PC gamers are using. And RDNA 2 is finally present in the main rankings, with the 6700 XT on an equal footing (in terms of participation) that Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3050 Ti (0.16%) and its GeForce RTX 2060 Max-Q cards for mobile devices (0.15%).

It will be interesting to see which Radeon RX 6000 series card will be the next to achieve a share of 0.15% or more. The Radeon RX 6600 XT is the least expensive of the bunch (until the Radeon RX 6600 arrives), but it’s only been out for a couple of months. And like all modern GPUs, it is sparse.

AMD CPUs have fared slightly better in adoption by Steam users, collectively working their way up to a 30.33% share. That slightly dwarfs its previous high of 30.13% in May this year.

This represents a gain of around 9% from just before AMD introduced its original Zen architecture in 2017 and returned to the enthusiast sector as a result.

Truth is, it hasn’t been a great year to try and build a new PC, which could be holding AMD back to some degree. The same can be said about some of AMD’s Ryzen 5000 series CPUs that are initially hard to find in stock (notably Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 9 5950X).

Some market analyzes say that eight of the ten best-selling CPUs are AMD Ryzen processors. The Ryzen 7 5800X and Ryzen 5 5600X take the top two spots.