12 Replies Latest reply on Nov 5, 2017 9:07 PM by gc9

AMD usage share plummets on Steam, from 17.1% to 10.8%, in October.

black_zion Nov 2, 2017 7:56 AM

And why is this important? Same reason it was after last month's large drop, AMD touts Vega specific features, but with that usage share, what incentive to developers have to use them? Decidedly not good news with the GTX 1070 Ti taking on Vega 56, with performance nudging the 1080. It's also not good for consumers either, as AMD is enabling prices to stay high.

A quick look at the prices shows why. The RX 580 is still $40 higher than launch price (thank you cryptominers), and $20 more expensive than the same power GTX 1060

And Vega 64 reference is still more expensive than the GTX 1080 custom, which pulls half the power.

Re: AMD usage share plummets on Steam, from 17.1% to 10.8%, in October.

ajlueke Nov 3, 2017 7:46 AM (in response to black_zion)

Actually, you can pick up an 8 Gb RX 580 for $279.00. While still $10 more expensive than a GTX 1060 and more power hungry, it isn't a horrible deal.

Also Vega 64 has fallen back to it's MSRP of $499.

But the numbers don't lie. I think a lot of gamers were waiting to see what Vega brought to the table before purchasing new hardware. It seems they now have decided they didn't like what they saw, either due to the performance, or the massive price inflation that has lasted since Vega's launch.

With the numbers coming back to parity in time for the holiday season and the threat of Volta pushed into 2018, those numbers may shift back the other direction before the year is out.
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- Re: AMD usage share plummets on Steam, from 17.1% to 10.8%, in October.
  
  black_zion Nov 3, 2017 9:56 AM (in response to ajlueke)
  
  Highly doubtful. Technical issues delaying AIB Vega cards; MSI "won't be making a custom card anytime soon" meaning they won't have time to get cheap against nVidia's custom offerings, not to mention if Re: First custom Vega 64 edition surfaces (ASUS): Drinks even MORE POWER! holds true for the rest of the AIB cards, then that's really not going to be good news. Now if Vega were to see massive price cuts, then yes, perhaps, but with the price being so close, even if I had to buy a new card today, I'd have to go with nVidia.
  
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  - Re: AMD usage share plummets on Steam, from 17.1% to 10.8%, in October.
    
    ajlueke Nov 3, 2017 11:07 AM (in response to black_zion)
    
    I wouldn't want my money contributing to Gameworks or G-sync, so for me the rift between AMD and Nvidia would have to be far larger for me to go over to team green.
    
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    - Re: AMD usage share plummets on Steam, from 17.1% to 10.8%, in October.
      
      black_zion Nov 3, 2017 11:38 AM (in response to ajlueke)
      
      I dealt with the Sapphire Radeon HD 5970 reference edition from day one for over two years, they are a sound trumped only by a baby's screams in terms of head splitting annoying. I would rather pay more for nVidia than ever use a stock AMD air cooler again.
      
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      - Re: AMD usage share plummets on Steam, from 17.1% to 10.8%, in October.
        
        ajlueke Nov 3, 2017 11:48 AM (in response to black_zion)
        
        I really can't argue that point, as I don't find the AMD reference cooler to be particularly useful. I tried it out in Vega 64, and found the GPU to top out around 1450 MHz do to hitting the upper thermal threshold even in balanced mode. Turbo mode is effectively useless, as the thermal boundary renders any increase in power limit moot.
        
        Users online have had some solid success undervolting. By dropping the voltage in P6 and P7 you can reach higher clockspeeds as the power limit and thermal limit bottlenecks take longer to reach. But yeah, the card as shipped can't make use of all it's features due to hitting the thermal ceiling with the stock cooler.
        
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        Re: AMD usage share plummets on Steam, from 17.1% to 10.8%, in October.
        
        black_zion Nov 3, 2017 12:35 PM (in response to ajlueke)
        
        TomsHardware did an article on it: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-radeon-rx-vega-64-undervolting,5234.html
        
        That the temperatures might be higher than reported could also explain another finding: even though no errors show up on the screen, the HBM2 loses performance if it’s overclocked. This might be due to it running significantly hotter than current tools are reporting. Some of AMD’s board partners have asked the company about this, but haven't received a response. We do have one trustworthy source that puts these temperatures well above 90°C, though.
        
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Re: AMD usage share plummets on Steam, from 17.1% to 10.8%, in October.

qwixt Nov 3, 2017 12:35 PM (in response to black_zion)

Steam usage isn't really that good of a metric because the user still needs to approve it. Whenever I am asked, I always say no. I don't care about providing statistical data.

The reason why AMD usage might be dropping is that Vega is not a good value. Only now with the prices dropping is it starting to get close. From what I have investigated, I would only consider the vega 56 a good purchase value. I don't see much hope for custom vega 64 cards based on the asus card. I still find it hard to believe that a custom card could be so poor as that asus. The liquid cooled vegas 64s are at 1080 ti cost or more, yet perform more like a 1080+.

If I had to buy one, it would be the 56, and I would install the 64 bios. But the reference cooler ruins it. The 64 LC I would buy since it is a bit quieter, but the cost performance ratio is way out of whack. I still would have thought a custom air solution could get close enough to the 64 LC performance, and at a cheaper price. One really curious thing I saw on youtube is a guy ran a fury or fury x, and vega 64 at the same clock speeds, and there was almost no difference in benchmarks. So that says to me that the drivers are either really bad still, or all those architectural changes were more about frequency improvements, and not IPC in reality.

I hold no allegiance to AMD or nvidia, but I do like to support the underdog if there is a competitive option. Unfortunately, due to pricing and/or performance, AMD really doesn't have an option for me in Vega. The price of the 64 LC has to drop considerably, or a custom card, which we might hear more about in Nov. It's disheartening to say, but I don't see amd putting up much high end competition in the future for nvidia. The market really needs it because nvidia is shameless with its prices without competition.
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- Re: AMD usage share plummets on Steam, from 17.1% to 10.8%, in October.
  
  qwixt Nov 4, 2017 4:02 AM (in response to qwixt)
  
  Maybe there is hope for custom cards
  
  https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/7aeoiw/first_look_at_xfx_vega_partner_board/
  
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  - Re: AMD usage share plummets on Steam, from 17.1% to 10.8%, in October.
    
    black_zion Nov 4, 2017 11:46 AM (in response to qwixt)
    
    I saw that yesterday, but I'm not going to get my hopes up. Much like with the ASUS Strix model, I think the only thing we can expect is better acoustical performance and a few more frames, they just can't do that much with as much power as it drinks and heat it puts off, which is why I think AMD marketed them heavily towards cryptominers, so they wouldn't be a write down, but us gamers are left with inflated prices from all sides and prayers our current cards don't implode. My Fury Nano is under warranty until March of next year, but if it were to blow, Sapphire probably would give me a Vega 56, and I wouldn't be happy at all...
    
    If you were expecting large leaps in performance from the ASUS ROG Strix RX Vega 64... you'll be disappointed. If you were expecting big drops in temperatures, you'd also be wrong. I'll cover all of this in the full review in the coming days, but ASUS does what they can with the ROG Strix RX Vega 64.
    
    Read more: https://www.tweaktown.com/articles/8374/asus-rog-strix-vega-64-unboxed-first-custom-rx/index3.html
    
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    - Re: AMD usage share plummets on Steam, from 17.1% to 10.8%, in October.
      
      qwixt Nov 5, 2017 9:28 AM (in response to black_zion)
      
      XFX doesn't make nvidia cards, so they have to come up with something special. If the price is right, I am good with 64 LC performance and more quiet. I learned with the 290x or 290 to not buy reference cards any more. I told myself, "be patient" Kind of sad too, because vega 56 flashed with a 64 bios is a good deal. Just not with the reference cooler and sound profile.
      
      These cards thermally throttle, and that asus card should have shown some performance improvement due to the cooler. Comments/reddit was blaming amd's bios or slowness at coming out with a new supporting bios.
      
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      - Re: AMD usage share plummets on Steam, from 17.1% to 10.8%, in October.
        
        black_zion Nov 5, 2017 10:13 AM (in response to qwixt)
        
        AMD's biggest problem is chip inconsistency, the AMD's Vega problem: 3 packages, 2 HBM2 manufacturers, 1 (awful) cooler which led to AMD to change packaging suppliers for Vega 11; manufacturers for Vega 20 which has added cost and complexity to the mix, plus TomsHardware did a review showing that the temperatures AMD's software reports are incorrect, slashing performance by 20% as the HBM overheats.
        
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Re: AMD usage share plummets on Steam, from 17.1% to 10.8%, in October.

gc9 Nov 5, 2017 9:07 PM (in response to black_zion)
The attention grabbing thread title is about market share on Steam. That survey is dominated by midmarket cards and below. All the discussion so far is about high-end enthusiast cards which make up only about 3% of the Steam surveyed users, so not very relevant to the title.

The "Steam Hardware & Software Survey: October 2017" page also shows
a sudden 20% shift from Windows 10 to Windows 7, and
a sudden 25% shift to speaking Simplified Chinese.

A possible conclusion: Some change suddenly opened up Steam to a huge number of Chinese players.

The videocard detail page shows that the cards that increased marketshare are not Vega56 or Vega64 competitors. Competitors for these cards, such as GeForce 1070, 1080, and 1080 Ti, also lost marketshare. The cards that gained signficant marketshare include GeForce 750, 750Ti, 950, 960, 1050, 1050 Ti, 1060. (Many older cards by several manufacturers made insignificant gains.)

A possible conclusion: The huge number of Chinese players had many midmarket Nvidia cards, not competitors to Vega.

RX 460 and RX 480 are listed with very low percentages. RX 470, RX 470D, RX 550, RX 560, RX 570, RX 580 are strangely missing. If Mindfactory public numbers are in very rough proportion, I'd expect something more like a 4:1 ratio (or 48:12) of midmarket GeForce (x50, x60) to Radeon RX Polaris, but this Steam report videocard subpage shows something more like 60:1. RX460 is steady, but RX480 has been declining.

A possible question: Have almost all 2017 RX Polaris cards been bought up by (large scale not-gaming-on-Steam) compute customers, such as blockchain miners? (Seems unlikely, especially for RX 550 and RX 560.)
A possible question: Is something preventing 2017 RX cards from appearing in the Steam survey? Could the survey be misrecognizing cards?
What other evidence could be gathered?
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