Hardware support: Steam Hardware Survey - July 2021 - Analysis and Discussion

Steam Hardware Survey - July 2021 - Analysis and Discussion
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Steam Hardware Survey - July 2021 - Analysis and Discussion

Posted: 02 Aug 2021 06:24 PM PDT

Steam has released their Hardware Survey report for July 2021

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

However I don't want to just link to the Survey and have that be the end of it.

So instead I've opted to provide a bit of analysis, and do a little mythbusting, of some of the common things I hear about the Steam Hardware Survey (abbrev. SHS).

There is no TL;DR, but there are summaries in each section.

General

Not listed in the SHS directly is the total monthly number of Steam users, which over this past year has seen a dramatic increase and seems to be holding at around 120 million users. So when Steam gives a percentage of users on a particular OS, or using a particular GPU, that percentage refers to that overall number. So when Steam says that 67.2% of users are running 1920x1080p displays, you can determine that correlates to roughly 80 million users.

It's also important to recognize that SHS =/= The PC Gaming Market as a whole. They are simply one very popular storefront for PC gaming. I'm sure there are a number of users who play games exclusively offered through EGS, Battle.Net, Origin, or GOG. But with their popularity, and monthly user count of 120 million, I'm willing to accept that their SHS is representative enough of the PC gaming market to make some conclusions.

Myth - The Steam Hardware Survey is inaccurate because I didn't get polled. or They have to poll everyone for it to be accurate.

The SHS relies on Random Sampling, which is a well understood practice in statistics.

As a basic example; Imagine that you had a population of squirrels, let's just say 5000, and you wanted to know how many squirrels had grey fur, versus brown fur. You don't have to capture all 5000 squirrels to figure out how many squirrels have each color of fur. You can instead randomly sample a few hundred squirrels, and figure out a ratio, or percentage, of that smaller random sample pool that have each color of fur. And then apply that to the larger population to get a fairly accurate estimation of the color distribution of the squirrels fur.

You have to make sure your sample size is large enough to not introduce sampling errors, but if you do have a large enough sample size, you can get a very representative breakdown of data.

GPUs

Overall, not seeing major shifts in terms of 'The Big Picture', Nvidia retains a market-share of greater than 75%, with AMD hovering around 15%, and Intel iGPUs holding steady at 9%. Minor decimal differences between them account for the remaining 1%, along with a small number of VIA GPU chipsets if you want to get detailed about it.

The fastest growing single GPU spec is the RTX 3060 Laptop GPU, adding 0.15% to it's user count, which totals at 0.68%.

Second place goes to the GTX 550ti but is a mirage. In May the GTX 550ti dipped below the 0.15% threshold that SHS uses to create its list of top GPUs, meaning that it blipped above that threshold this month, making it appear to gain a significant number of users. If you look back at the SHS results from April, you'll see the GTX 550ti is at the same 0.15% it was then. Realistically this means there has been no significant change to the number of GTX 550 ti users. It is also the only Fermi GPU high enough in user count to be listed.

Third Place is the RTX 3060, which added 0.13% of users, bringing its user count to 0.67%.

GPUs By Generation

For these totals, I've tried to keep it to the desktop variants, ignoring the mobile GPUs when they are specified.

For Nvidia we see this breakdown:

Generation	Percentage
Kepler (GTX 600 and GTX 700)	2.24%
Maxwell (GTX 900)	4.49%
Pascal (GTX 1000)	25.62%
Turing GTX (GTX 1600)	15.13%
Turing RTX (RTX 2000)	12.65%
Ampere (RTX 3000)	3.8%
Total RTX	16.45%

As you can clearly see, Pascal is still a very popular GPU generation. Many of the GPUs that were released in that generation continue to be very capable in games that are releasing into this year.

Additionally, take note of the overall adoption of Turing GTX and RTX GPUs, in total they account for 27.78% of the overall GPUs on SHS, a small fraction more than Pascal GPUs.

However, I think the Ampere percentage is interesting. 3.8% sure sounds like a very small number of GPUs, but when applied to the overall number of Steam Users, You find that there are nearly 5 million (4,560,000) users with Ampere GPUs. For a GPU generation that has been talked about as if it's made of unobtanium, that's a large number of GPUs in gaming systems. I'm certain that there are a large number of Ampere GPUs in mining systems, and so I'll be very interested to see what happens when crypto-currencies eventually crash enough that GPUs will start to become offloaded. We are likely in for a spike of Ampere users to appear in the SHS when that happens.

And for AMD we see this breakdown:

Generation	Percentage
GCN 1/2/3 Gen(All previous AMD GPUs)	1.65%
Polaris (RX 400 and RX 500)	5.1%
Vega (APU+Discrete)	2.17%
RDNA1 (RX5000)	1.57%

Polaris was clearly a very successful generation for AMD, while it is bolstered by the fact that AMD really didn't stop making Polaris GPUs. They've basically had Polaris GPUs in production from 2016 to 2020, with RX 590 GMEs (effectively a rebadged RX 580) continuing to be produced for the Chinese market.

GCN architecture GPUs before the Polaris generation are very difficult to parse from the SHS, That's why I've opted to bundle them into one 'generation', even though they stretch across several generations of GPUs. When GPUs are listed as "AMD Radeon R7 Graphics" it's hard to say exactly what that would be, considering AMDs practice of rebranding GCN products into new generations with minimal changes. Radeon R7 includes GPUs that are GCN 1.0, GCN 2.0, and GCN 3.0.

Vega GPUs in the SHS are primarily APU components, the highest ranked Vega GPU is the "AMD Radeon Vega 8 Graphics" at 1.16%. There is a more generic "AMD Radeon RX Vega" which I believe refers to all the discrete variants of Vega GPUs, Vega 56/65, with 0.18%.

RDNA1/RX 5000 GPUs are the most recent AMD GPUs in the SHS, but their numbers are surprisingly low. For a relative comparison, the RTX 3070 (1.53%) has similar market share to the entire RDNA1 generation combined. And the most popular RDNA1 GPU, the RX 5700XT (0.80%) has less marketshare than the RTX 3080 (0.85%). I'm not sure how to explain the low volume of RDNA1 GPUs, apart from the fact that these were some of the first large volume 7nm GPUs entered into production, and the 7nm yields 2 years ago may not have been the best.

RDNA2/RX 6000 GPUs are not represented in enough volume to register in the SHS. Meaning that at most there are less than 0.15% of any particular RDNA2/RX 6000 GPU.

Myth - The GTX 1060 is the most popular GPU, and so most developers will/should target that specific level of performance.

While it's true that the GTX 1060 remains the single most popular GPU listed in the SHS, there are more GPUs listed that are significantly more powerful than the GTX 1060. Using Techpowerups GPU hierarchy chart, and using the GTX 1060 6GB as a point of reference, we can count up the total number of GPUs (or at least the top listed) that are 30%+ faster than a 1060. i.e. a 1660 Super or faster.

GPU	Percentage
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060	8.90%
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060	5.35%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti - 2.90%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070	2.72%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER	2.47%
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER	2.11%*
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070	1.68%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080	1.63%
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070	1.53%*
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER	1.32%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti	0.99%*
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080	0.85%*
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER	0.82%*
AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT	0.80%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti	0.80%
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080	0.73%*
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060	0.64%
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti	0.64%*
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti	0.41%*
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090	0.37%*
AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT	0.29%
AMD Radeon RX Vega (assuming Vega 56, Vega 64)	0.18

TOTAL 30% faster	28.59%
TOTAL 100% faster	8.45%

With that perspective, we can see that there are more than 3 times as many users with GPUs that are significantly faster than a 1060.

Additionally, you can also count up the GPUs that are twice as fast as the GTX 1060 (see starred), and using that you can see that there are almost as many GPUs that are twice as fast as the GTX 1060, as there are GTX 1060s.

There is an additional wrinkle here though, as I suspect that the GTX 1060 that is listed in the SHS makes no distinction between the 6GB model and the 3GB model. So the expectation of how a "GTX 1060" performs can be thrown off by the lower performance of the 3GB model, which was very popular due to it's low price and excellent performance in esports titles. There are a number of GPUs that straddle that line of being 30% faster than a 1060 3GB, but not 30% faster than a 1060 6GB.

Altogether, that 28.59% of users with GPUs faster than a GTX 1060 is a pretty sizable number, and should definitely weigh on a developers decisions of what graphical demands they can place on a users system.

CPUs

We aren't seeing major shifts in CPU marketshare. Compared to just last month you might consider the 0.78% shift to AMD to be significant, but if you look at the SHS results from April and May, you'll see that AMD is slightly down from those months. What's likely happening right now is either sampling noise, or any new systems are just being built with whatever CPUs are available. Intel CPUs are available right now with significant discounts, which make them good buys for anyone building a PC, even compared a more powerful AMD CPU that would normally be in the same MSRP range.

Core Counts

Looking at the top three core counts, 4 core, 6 core, 8 core, we can see a few trends starting to form.

Quad-core CPUs are declining slowly but consistently over multiple months, while Hex-core CPUs see some patterns of rising and falling, and Octo-core CPUs see a continuous rise.

Hex-core CPUs are likely just being beaten out by increasingly affordable Octo-core CPUs, from both AMD and Intel. Giving buyers little incentive to go with a lower core count part.

Core Count	Percentage
4-core or less	53.26%
4-core only	38.76%
6-core or more	46.74%
8-core or more	15.63%

Based on the overall percentages here, 4-core and 2-core CPUs are still holding out. Which makes sense, there really isn't a drive from the game side to more than 4-cores outside of some of the latest Vulkan and DX12 titles. For esports and casual players, 2-core CPUs are likely still a very capable performer.

But If I were a developer right now, I'd be focusing on that 6-core+ market, it seems to be the right balance point, considering the current market share of CPUs with greater than 4-cores, it makes sense to target 6-cores specifically, with 8-cores just having more overhead for simultaneous tasks.

There is a precipitous drop in the number of CPUs using greater than 8-cores. We aren't likely to see more than 8-cores as a focus for developers, given the current market data, and the next gen consoles, pointing to 8-cores as the highest tier of the market. Effectively I'd consider Octo-cores to be the new Quad-cores, when it comes to gaming.

I will not be digging into CPU frequency/frequency ranges, as I suspect they are unreliable indicators of system performance. And without the combined information of core-counts with their respective CPU frequency, there isn't much to gain from talking about them.

RAM and VRAM

RAM

SHS unfortunately does not have as granular of a breakdown as I'd like here, the highest tier options are "16GB" and "More than 16GB".

16GB is the most popular config, with 45.43% of users.

8GB is second place, with 25.14% of users.

And "More than 16GB" takes "Third Place", with 11.81% of users having more than 16GB of system memory. Without being able to break that down further, it's very unhelpful.

If I were building a new system today, I'd combine this information with the previous information about CPUs, and I'd try to keep a 6-core CPU and 16GB of memory as my minimum configuration. That should ensure that any games being developed with PC specs in mind would run well on my system, as if it was made for it.

I'd also encourage anyone still running 8GB of memory to upgrade if possible. Obviously right now the market sucks overall, but when things calm down, consider 16GB of RAM to be a target.

SHS makes no distinction between DDR2, DDR3, or DDR4 RAM.

VRAM

This one is harder to choose as an end-user, because it's defined by your GPU choice. Gone are the days of slotting in a couple of memory sticks into your Matrox and doubling your VRAM.

Instead I think it's more important to note that 6GB and 8GB of VRAM are the two most common configurations in the SHS, with 23.84% and 22.31% of users respectively. The third most common is 4GB at 17.47%.

Based on the VRAM on display here, and the shared memory configurations of the latest consoles, I think it's likely that a 6GB GPU will continue to perform admirably in cross platform games. The more powerful CPUs used in the latest consoles will be put to work, necessitating more memory allocated to them of the fixed 16GB available for both CPU and GPU. The Xbox Series S practically guarantees that 6GB (and perhaps even 4GB) GPUs will be usable for a long while, with it's powerful 8-core CPU, and fixed 10GB of shared CPU and GPU memory.

Like CPU core counts, VRAM amounts drop off precipitously above 8GB, with 10GB, 11GB, 12GB, and 24GB accounting for a combined 6.29%

Operating Systems

Nothing too crazy here, just interesting to note how much more popular MacOS(2.51%) is relative to all the various flavors of Linux(1%). Linux did see a gain of 0.11%, with Windows seeing an overall decline of 0.08%. I doubt that changes much in the eyes of a developer however, with Windows continuing to hold 96.49% of the overall market.

This is the chicken and the egg problem of Linux gaming. Developers have very little incentive to have tailor made versions of their games for Linux, because very few users are on Linux. And users have very little reason to set up their gaming system on Linux, because the game support is so poor.

Proton is helping, but it's not perfect. And there are other features and software missing or unusable on Linux that make it difficult to recommend for most PC users.

It will be very interesting to see the take-rate of Windows 11 once that is formally released.

Other Thoughts

I know that Steam provides a custom tailored version of the SHS for developers that release their games on Steam. Giving those developers a breakdown of the kinds of hardware their specific customers have. I do not have access to such information, but I think it would be very interesting to see the hardware breakdown of the players of certain popular, but graphically demanding, games.

Additionally, I know that Steam is able to correlate multiple pieces of information, but the public version of the SHS does not allow you to do so. For example, I'd like to know what kinds of GPUs users with more than 16GB of system RAM use, but I can't filter the public data that way.

There are also some missing parameters that the SHS should be able to poll and then track, HDR support for example, and monitor refresh rate. Neither are listed currently in the public SHS. Similarly, information that gets bundled together like "More than 16GB", should be provided in more detail.

EDITS: -Added more detail to GPU generations

submitted by /u/zyck_titan
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"Google Tensor debuts on the new Pixel 6 this fall"

Posted: 02 Aug 2021 09:23 AM PDT

submitted by /u/Dakhil
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Posted: 02 Aug 2021 09:05 PM PDT

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