Steam hardware survey shows Ampere and CPU core usage growth

pcinvasion.com:

Steam’s monthly hardware survey has been released for February 2022, and it continues to show growth in quite a few areas. While some aspects like VR usage stayed stagnant, there was a continued increase in the use of a number of graphics cards and CPUs.

When looking at the graphics card side of things, the numbers indicate that more and more users are starting to get their hands on Ampere-based graphics cards. The GPUs that saw the largest increase was the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop GPU at .29% to 2.35% and the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 at .26% to 1.92%. While those percentages look small, with over 120 million active users, you are looking at over 348,000 new users utilizing a mobile GPU and over 312,000 users finally joining the ranks of Ampere graphics card owners. Obviously that doesn’t account for those who didn’t take the survey, but we’re acting as though each user did to put the numbers into perspective.

Aside from the RTX 3090, which fell by .01%, every other available Ampere-based card saw an increase in adoption. The RTX 3050 jumped up .20%, while the RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3060 Ti both increased by .09%.

Nvidia GPU shares rising is definitely good news for team green, but what about AMD? Well, unfortunately for them, it’s a bit of a different story. Only one AMD graphics card saw an increase in usage in February — the RX 6700 XT which rose by .01% to .22%. Every other standalone AMD GPU saw either no change or a decrease in market share.

In addition to graphics cards, CPUs also saw an increase in the average number of cores being found in machines. Quad-core machines fell by .82% in February, while six- and eight-core machines increased by .78% and .60%, respectively. Even 12- and 16-core CPUs saw modest