Kaarme:

What would they have if not an Nvidia GPU? You couldn't play anything with an old Intel iGPU, not even Terraria, I bet, so there would need to be a GPU. Most of them were from Nvidia. Remember that this is the Steam survey. People only install and launch Steam to play games, or at least the vast majority do. My dusty old laptop has Intel+Nvidia.

We can look at the survey in more detail - if it's all old intel/nvidia laptops then that will show up in the gpu charts as you'd have to see a big growth in old nvidia gpus. That's not happened therefore we can rule anything involving old nvidia gpus as the reason. If it was old laptops we should see a growth in 2/4 core machines, we don't, there's are big drops in 2/4 core usage and a huge growth in 6 cores. Hence that suggests lots of new machines are using steam with 6 core cpu's which pretty completely rules out the old laptop theory.

deefop:

Based on the sales numbers we've been seeing, it's clear that Intel is getting slaughtered in sales at the moment.

It´s getting slaughtered in the DIY market of PC Desktop. And unfortunately for AMD, it's a small market, most people don't build their system, nor will they ever build it. The bulk of the sales is concentrated in OEMs and mobile, and this continues to be dominated by Intel by a large margin. Perhaps now with the Ryzen 4xxx on mobile, AMD will start to gain some significant market share, but even that will always take a long time, it is not overnight or in a few months.

GSDragoon:

Same, the results can't be trusted. My old system (with an Intel CPU and Nvidia GPU) used to get survey requests all the time. Since I upgraded to a Radeon GPU last year, they stopped. The new computer I built last summer (Ryzen build with the AMD GPU) has never been prompted to submit results. The Steam survey is skewed. I wouldn't be surprised if someone is paying to have results in their favor.

I have had Nvidia for the past 6 years and Steam never asked me to take a survey.

Due to world conditions, work at home due to cold going around... Yes people are using LOTS of old laptops, and buying pre-owned or used/off-lease systems - but most won't see Steam installed - MOST will not. So we will have to look elsewhere for the source, and it may not be just the fancy "electronic baby-sitter" we thought it was at first glance. Lots of the increase is the new systems being built from parts getting a 2nd lease on life - mostly old XEON chips going out on 'new' off-brand Chinese-made motherboards (with salvaged used chipsets) via Ali-express in pre-assembled (and sometimes not) combos with cheap used ECC server memory. Lots of this stuff is super cheap, as there really isn't much reason to buy the stuff from servers except by you and I to maybe update an old machine, or make a spare for the applicable of-age child growing up in the family who's 'now old enough to computer'. While it's not exceedingly common here in the USA, many folks in other countries only have these older tech systems as an option. Mostly this is due to poor regional pricing, whether due to tariffs, due to logistics, or due to currency conversion woes - it doesn't matter. The end result is the same. For them, it shall be plenty good enough, and with any recent video card - even a 100$ USD card - they can game at-least as good as any console AND do a whole lot more that you CANNOT do on console. Mods (for games) come to mind. If I didn't have a computer, and I got a computer with a 6-core 12-thread 3.0~3.4ghz XEON chip in it, with 16gb of ECC 1600mhz memory in it in dual channel (yes, board cost-cutting), and even a 50$ used video card in it, I'd be THRILLED. Most games are NOT going to peg the CPU. Some outliers will, but many won't, especially so when ported from consoles from the PS4/XB? AMD Bulldozer (FX!) chip family, which even these 5~6 year old XEONs will run absolute circles around on anything AI or physics heavy, and do decently better than console chips in most everything else. Whenever a company pushes out a new board design with a not-before-used socket (by grey-market companies) it will almost always have a small uptick in surveys of hardware, as there's one heck of a market for these. That kid who wants modded Minecraft on a PC. The friend of that kid who finally got modded Minecraft to run on the PC without virusing it to death several times first. That friend's sister, who also likes Minecraft. The guy who watched too many BeamNG Drive car crash videos on YouTube and wants to try it out for himself because 'hey it looks fun' (and it is). All that guy's friends. The circle goes on and on. Minecraft and BeamNG Drive used as examples, but this and game-mods apply to almost any modable (and even not) games on PC. In third world countries or those countries where the above-mentioned cost of new parts is astronomical, this might just be the only meaningful logical way to get a decent performing computer without spending as much as you spent on your living quarters in the last 6 months. In the USA it doesn't really make sense to try and import 'grey market' chipset motherboards - but in many other countries the opposite is true. So for them, this is entirely where it's at. YouTube has a lot of reviews on these grey market 'salvage chipset' motherboards, which can often be a hybrid of two different chipsets/sockets, and may or may not support all the features the original socket's chipset did when new. They aren't the best boards, but they'll do just fine, and get you from here to computer without much issue. Do not forget, that for every customer that buys a 200$ motherboard, there's a dozen to dozens of them if not more that buy a 100~120$ motherboard. As cost increases, and performance for dollar spent decreases, there becomes exponentially less buyers for electronic items in question. To that end, that's not 100% the whole reason or the whole story, but it's a chunk of it, without a doubt.

Total BS, of course...:) How many times must it be said that the Steam survey is neither scientific nor inclusive. It's an opt-in situation, only. I haven't opted in in years and I am surely not alone. Look at the retail sales numbers in which Intel is so far behind in sales it has to look up to see the bottoms of AMD's feet. Maybe we should change the Steam Survey to the "Grasping at Straws" survey that manages to prove pretty much nothing at all.

Intel is better for gaming no surprise here

LOL I think its people stuck at home due to the human malware. So now we have people playing games on machines they had but didn't have time to play. Just a theory.

MonstroMart:

I've not done their survey in years. I still count as an Intel and nVidia user probably.

Cool story bro...

STEAM statistic?? 😀DD Steam is statistic about OLD laptops statistics..

And this ladies and gentlemen is why you should never use Steam as any kind of reliable statistic for how the market is moving or sales. It means diddly squat other then "Ohhh, meaningless numbers" Their graph and "more info" don't agree with eachother as well. The graph says March 2020 is the latest information with 18.75% and 81.25% https://i.imgur.com/8S3cQvn.png The more info page says March 2020 is the latest information with 21.15% and 78.85% https://i.imgur.com/NBU4AAL.png Both can't be true. If the more info tab is lagged behind, i'd be interested to see what the rest of the statistics (core count, cpu frequencies, etc.) change when it's not lagged behind.

so I took a look at the more detailed stats, there is overall growth in intel cpus , and most of the growth was in the 2.7-2.99ghz segment and the 1.7ghz to 1.99ghz ranges, seems to support that it is infact people dusting off a laptop or older pc. intel processors >3.3ghz are down overall from feb to march. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/processormfg/

I don't think it's just old PCs being resumed, I would bet there are many new sells for Intel in this period. People are locked down at home, entire familys, familys that used to have a single PC and that now feel the need to get one more device to share. Nowadays for an hardcore user there's no reason to buy INTEL, most would buy AMD... while INTEL aficionados would just wait a couple of months to get the new CPUs. But what for casuals? They know nothing about Ryzens or AMD... or Comet Lake, casuals will just get the brand with higher recognition or look at their current laptop (which in most of the cases will be INTEL) and search for something similiar. BINGO, milions of familys locked down at home = easy sells for INTEL.

Currently all of my systems that I own are all Intel but that is going to change this summer when I upgrade my primary rig to an AMD Ryzen rig. Not surprised if the info was accurate because even though AMD has gained ground there is still a lot of Intel CPUs in the wild considering Intel was very dominant until Ryzen launched.

JimmyTheShoe:

Sweet summer children... Steam permanently and at all times logs your system information, you don't have outdated info and your data was (not) never registered simply because you've never completed a survey since kindergarten or whatever case may be. They do this from the get go on any device the client gets activated, so yes, the detective kits need to get returned because your conspiracies make no sense statistically.

First post and created just to post garbage? Good job. Steam may understand what your hardware is regardless of it being submitted or not, yes. But that's not the same thing as your information, if you didn't submit a survey, being included in the public steam stats. If you believe otherwise, you need a tinfoil hat.

I am not comfortable with these news, therefore its fake.

There's been a bit of a run on both new and refurbished (off-lease several generation old) PC's both desktop and laptop as of late with all this work-at-home stuff going down. Kids need to be online to fetch packets of work for them to do. Kids require some for of electronic babysitter for parental sanity sake. Parents need to be online to work and read news if not watching it on TV. Spoke with some contacts of mine that handle (mostly currently closed!) retail channels like this with PC stuff, and some of the local delivery folks. Even before Covid closed down most of the non-essential retail stores such as Worst Buy, there was a bit of a run on low-end up to mid-grade PC's. While they weren't officially sold out like the toilet paper, eggs, and other essentials got sold out, they were definitely moving quite a bit of inventory. Onto what I said before, in a previous post: SAFE FOR WORK computer hardware assembly video below [spoiler] $99 LGA 2011 Motherboard 6-Core CPU 8 GB RAM Budget Bundle - YouTube [youtube=T8B-2djmm7o] [/spoiler] There's loads of these cheap kits running rounds around world delivery services right now as we sit here. If I only had 100$ plus money for a graphics card, psu, case, and input/output devices, then I'd strongly consider this. Before anyone gets any buyer's remorse over their recent system purchase, the likes of a Ryzen 3600 or intel i7 8700 / 8700k would be about double the performance of this above-listed video's build. I for one am VERY thankful for those cheap Chinese motherboards. Why? I only need to look over at my old PC, who's pci-express locking tab wouldn't let go of the video board I needed out of it, ended up ripping the whole primary PCI-express slot off of the motherboard because of that stupid locking tab design. R.I.P. Asus Z97 Maximus Hero. I immediate went around after this happened, and snapped off all the locking tabs on the rest of the boards I had in use in the house, and then proceeded to remove them from the extras I keep in the closet 'just in case'. So if I have a PC with a dead motherboard, just look to the high prices we only had available from dead-stocks of X58 1366 Socket motherboards for how many years, until Huanan and others came along, salvage chip sets and making new boards out of them. Sure they weren't as fancy as when x58 boards were new, but it'll surely put your PC back into operation as good as any OEM PC would have been when it was new. This is what you're seeing. This and the above previously mentioned things.

bobblunderton:

There's been a bit of a run on both new and refurbished (off-lease several generation old) PC's both desktop and laptop as of late with all this work-at-home stuff going down. Kids need to be online to fetch packets of work for them to do. Kids require some for of electronic babysitter for parental sanity sake. Parents need to be online to work and read news if not watching it on TV. Spoke with some contacts of mine that handle (mostly currently closed!) retail channels like this with PC stuff, and some of the local delivery folks. Even before Covid closed down most of the non-essential retail stores such as Worst Buy, there was a bit of a run on low-end up to mid-grade PC's. While they weren't officially sold out like the toilet paper, eggs, and other essentials got sold out, they were definitely moving quite a bit of inventory. Onto what I said before, in a previous post: SAFE FOR WORK computer hardware assembly video below [spoiler] $99 LGA 2011 Motherboard 6-Core CPU 8 GB RAM Budget Bundle - YouTube [youtube=T8B-2djmm7o] [/spoiler] There's loads of these cheap kits running rounds around world delivery services right now as we sit here. If I only had 100$ plus money for a graphics card, psu, case, and input/output devices, then I'd strongly consider this. Before anyone gets any buyer's remorse over their recent system purchase, the likes of a Ryzen 3600 or intel i7 8700 / 8700k would be about double the performance of this above-listed video's build. I for one am VERY thankful for those cheap Chinese motherboards. Why? I only need to look over at my old PC, who's pci-express locking tab wouldn't let go of the video board I needed out of it, ended up ripping the whole primary PCI-express slot off of the motherboard because of that stupid locking tab design. R.I.P. Asus Z97 Maximus Hero. I immediate went around after this happened, and snapped off all the locking tabs on the rest of the boards I had in use in the house, and then proceeded to remove them from the extras I keep in the closet 'just in case'. So if I have a PC with a dead motherboard, just look to the high prices we only had available from dead-stocks of X58 1366 Socket motherboards for how many years, until Huanan and others came along, salvage chip sets and making new boards out of them. Sure they weren't as fancy as when x58 boards were new, but it'll surely put your PC back into operation as good as any OEM PC would have been when it was new. This is what you're seeing. This and the above previously mentioned things.

Also not only that you have users who are purchasing old prebuilt workstation machines as well from the Sandy or Ivy Bridge era for decent prices and turning them into gaming PCs or purchasing them Chinese motherboards and purchasing one of them Sandy bridge or Ivy bridge Xeons as well. Sandy and Ivy Bridge Xeons are pretty decently priced now a days. I have an x58 Workstation Dell PC that I turned into a cheap high core high threaded all around PC that can game as well as do other stuff. Also some of those Chinese motherboards that can take a Sandy/Ivy bridge Xeon have nice features as well such as m2 SATA support.