AMD’s gaming CPU market share surges past 40% on Steam as Intel stumbles

It has been a weird year for tech trends, with underdogs managing to score a win against their once-impervious rivals. We’ve only just recovered from seeing Linux take a 5% share in userbase for the first time ever, and now we’re seeing what looks like a pretty big shift away from Intel’s hardware, at least in the gaming scene. Recent Steam surveys have revealed that AMD has been on a slow but sure advance against Intel’s dominance, managing to accrue over 40% of the Steam user playerbase just last month.

AMD begins taking wins over Intel in the Steam scene

As spotted by Tom’s Hardware, Valve has published the statistics for its latest monthly round of Steam surveys. If you haven’t heard of them before, Valve occasionally asks players to submit their hardware specs via an automatic scan that checks out what’s installed and beams the result back to the company. The idea is that Valve and other developers can then leverage the data to better tweak their games’ ideal system requirements based on the actual hardware that gamers own, instead of delivering something that either can’t be run by current hardware or woefully underuses it. It’s by no means a 100% accurate measure of what PC gamers are using, but it’s the best we’ve got.

If you pop over to the Steam hardware survey results, you’ll see that AMD has taken 40.39% of the market share on Steam, versus Intel, which is sitting on 59.52%. It’s quite a big shift compared to March, where AMD had 37.62% and Intel had 62.30%. AMD gaining just under 3% of Intel’s market share in the space of four months is pretty rapid, all things considered.

So, what’s causing the shift? Well, AMD has been doing a good job of keeping gamers happy, with processors that come in at a good price point and offer a ton of bang for their buck. Meanwhile, Intel has been embroiled with several issues with its CPUs, such as its Raptor Lake instability problem that caused people’s CPUs to degrade over time. And while it’s impossible to say for sure if AMD will eventually surpass Intel in the CPU market, it’s certainly putting up a strong enough fight to make it something that is feasibly possible.

If you’ve been out of the CPU loop for a while and want to study up on how both brands are faring these days, we have a few pieces you can check out. For instance, we explored whether AMD or Intel offers the best value for desktop consumers, alongside some key differences between the two.