Steam Hardware Surveys - are they accurate?

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HAL_404

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just had a Steam pop up window ask me to take a hardware survey so I did. Interesting thing is the OS install date it showed :eek:

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I don't feel they are accurate. I had AMD video cards for 10+ years and it never prompted me to do a survey. Since buying NVIDIA, it asks me every 2 months to do a survey. I have a suspicion there is something there (paid for by Nvidia) to inflate numbers for their video cards.
 
Scoobydo2 said:
I don't feel they are accurate. I had AMD video cards for 10+ years and it never prompted me to do a survey. Since buying NVIDIA, it asks me every 2 months to do a survey. I have a suspicion there is something there (paid for by Nvidia) to inflate numbers for their video cards.
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It's completely random. There are 120 million active users on Steam, so your chances of being picked are extremely low. I've had NVIDIA cards since becoming a Steam user when the beta launched in 2003 and I've only been picked 4 times in that 18 year period.
 
Scoobydo2 said:
I don't feel they are accurate. I had AMD video cards for 10+ years and it never prompted me to do a survey. Since buying NVIDIA, it asks me every 2 months to do a survey. I have a suspicion there is something there (paid for by Nvidia) to inflate numbers for their video cards.
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Has a reference had steam for more than 15 year's, not sure if I ever had a survey, I thought it was automatically run by it without asking.

In the last 6 year's:
adeon-and-NVIDIA-GeForce-GPU-Market-Share-1030x359.png

NVidia discrete gpu market share seem to stay between 70 to 80% while amd high 10x to 30%

Looking only at DX12 Gpus on the hardware survey, seem to show 70% Nvidia to 10% AMD, 6.12% intel.

So of the discrete DX12 GPU market that match the Nvidia domination (2014-2015+) era, that seem to be 87.5% Nvidia to 12.5% AMD which seem to low versus the Dgpu market share over that period.

Is the market where steam is popular different than the world market ? Is gamers more Nvidia heavy than the population has a whole (not sure how big and relevant on gamer that still buy dGPU in that intel dominated era), is the personality of the AMD buyers a bit different and less likely to answer survey or is there like you said some paid for bias, not sure how much people use that survey in their buying decision and I do not remember ever popping up in any marketing material on the newegg of the world either. Maybe a lot more of the model not making the cut to show up are relevant AMD model (5500xt-5600xt) etc... than Nvidia one and that add a bit to the discrepancy.

For example more than 30% of steam userbase seem to be chinese now, if that hardware market is different than ours that would make steam numbers look strange to us even if they are perfectly legit just by how giant the China part of the survey could be.
 
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LukeTbk said:
Had a reference had steam for more than 15 year's, not sure if I ever had a survey, I thought it was automatically run by it without asking.

In the last 6 year's:
View attachment 374944

NVidia discrete gpu market share seem to stay between 70 to 80% while amd high 10x to 30%

Looking only at DX12 Gpus on the hardware survey, seem to show 70% Nvidia to 10% AMD, 6.12% intel.

So of the discrete DX12 GPU market that match the Nvidia domination (2014-2015+) era, that seem to be 87.5% Nvidia to 12.5% AMD which seem to low versus the Dgpu market share over that period.

Is the market where steam is popular different than the world market ? Is gamers more Nvidia heavy than the population has a whole (not sure how big and relevant on gamer that still buy dGPU in that intel dominated era), is the personality of the AMD buyers a bit different and less likely to answer survey or is there like you said some paid for bias, not sure how much people use that survey in their buying decision and I do not remember ever popping up in any marketing material on the newegg of the world either. Maybe a lot more of the model not making the cut to show up are relevant AMD model (5500xt-5600xt) etc... than Nvidia one and that add a bit to the discrepancy.

For example more than 30% of steam userbase seem to be chinese now, if that hardware market is different than ours that would make steam numbers look strange to us even if they are percently legit by how giant it is.
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Steam has a version for the Chinese market now. I wonder if they separate survey results or will?
 
I get surveyed all the time. The problem is, I have Steam on around ten machines. It always seems to survey me when I’m logged in on a laptop or something, not when I’m on my main game PC, so the results they get from me always look lower end :D
 
It's fine it's just a bit random rather than slamming everyone each month which would gain better results. AMD has always been a largely non issue hardware side though. Reality is most people game on laptops and 1080p 60hz screens and get a worse than console experience but they pirate games and use sales. Hence the turbo inflated i3/i5 and 1050 gpu type items. We here are just a fucking blip in their stats.

Also who's run a cyber care, raise hands (me raises hand halfway). A few of my friends ran them in the USA and I helped support them. That gaming side largely mimics the corporate side where AMD is just a no no because of bugs. I don't just mean drivers I also mean chipset and controller issues, people are just gun shy.

J3RK said:
I get surveyed all the time. The problem is, I have Steam on around ten machines. It always seems to survey me when I’m logged in on a laptop or something, not when I’m on my main game PC, so the results they get from me always look lower end :D
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I dunno it hits me on my desktop all the time and I have server grade SSDs so oh well.
 
I have heard a lot of behind the scenes conversations about this over the years, and the general consensus is that the numbers are fubar enough that Valve is sorry they ever started making the data public, but were concerned with the public perception of pulling it back.
 
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He'll, it's not accurate. Not to mention people who is not taking part in the survey (clicking "cancel"), or simply noting is popping out on their machines, but I found very tricky way of how this works.

Officially this survey pop out random, but I don't believe in miracles, and that survey NEVER ever popęd out when I had AMD GPU - not a single time, but 2 times when I had GTX 1060, 3 times when I was on GTX 1080Ti and 1 time on RTX 3080. Is this coincidence? Beacuse I don't thing so.
 
it's accurate...the vast majority of PC gamers do not own the highest end hardware...it's more about value which is why the Nvidia 1060 is the most popular card
 
It WOULD be accurate if they would release info, that for one week they will make survey, and send it to all users.
 
LukeTbk said:
Has a reference had steam for more than 15 year's, not sure if I ever had a survey, I thought it was automatically run by it without asking.

In the last 6 year's:
View attachment 374944

NVidia discrete gpu market share seem to stay between 70 to 80% while amd high 10x to 30%

Looking only at DX12 Gpus on the hardware survey, seem to show 70% Nvidia to 10% AMD, 6.12% intel.

So of the discrete DX12 GPU market that match the Nvidia domination (2014-2015+) era, that seem to be 87.5% Nvidia to 12.5% AMD which seem to low versus the Dgpu market share over that period.

Is the market where steam is popular different than the world market ? Is gamers more Nvidia heavy than the population has a whole (not sure how big and relevant on gamer that still buy dGPU in that intel dominated era), is the personality of the AMD buyers a bit different and less likely to answer survey or is there like you said some paid for bias, not sure how much people use that survey in their buying decision and I do not remember ever popping up in any marketing material on the newegg of the world either. Maybe a lot more of the model not making the cut to show up are relevant AMD model (5500xt-5600xt) etc... than Nvidia one and that add a bit to the discrepancy.

For example more than 30% of steam userbase seem to be chinese now, if that hardware market is different than ours that would make steam numbers look strange to us even if they are perfectly legit just by how giant the China part of the survey could be.
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That data point is years old, here is the latest datapoint:
c_ohc=vOo4QAy2fUcAX_ZDZgH&_nc_ht=scontent.fsgn13-2.png
 
Looks like all the 4090 owners are clicking yes to the survey:

The top Nvidia card (4090) has popped into the Steam Hardware Survey above all of AMD's high-end RX 6000-series GPUs. And they've been around for years.


https://www.pcgamer.com/seriously-where-did-you-lot-get-the-money-for-all-those-rtx-4090s



Somehow Nvidia's RTX 4090(opens in new tab) has appeared in the Steam Hardware Survey(opens in new tab) for the first time this January, and has popped in above any of AMD's high-end graphics cards.

The AMD RX 6800 XT(opens in new tab) is one of the best GPUs the red team has ever released, and I get that the pandemic/chip shortage fun times kinda made it tough to buy, but it's been out since late 2020 and still comes in behind Nvidia's ~$2,000 graphics card.

And that's even with the Radeon card steadily gaining popularity and market share in the Steam survey since at least September.


RX 580 is AMD's most popular discrete graphics card according to the collected Steam Hardware Survey data, and there are more of those than RTX 4090, RX 6800 XT, and RX 6900 XT combined. So, AMD's got that, at least
 
I believe it. I know it's anecdotal but i don't know anyone in real life that use AMD GPUs anymore (except for the old RX570 in my son's PC). My PC gamer friends are mostly on 3090s and 4080s now and most will just laugh if you suggest AMD (even for a CPU).
 
Bankie said:
I believe it. I know it's anecdotal but i don't know anyone in real life that use AMD GPUs anymore (except for the old RX570 in my son's PC). My PC gamer friends are all on 3090s and 4080s now and most will just laugh if you suggest AMD (even for a CPU).
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Is it really that way? I've got a 3070 right now, by with the....5000(?) series come out, I wouldn't be opposed to Team Red.
 
Westwood said:
Is it really that way? I've got a 3070 right now, by with the....5000(?) series come out, I wouldn't be opposed to Team Red.
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Yeah, my son and I are the only ones in that circle that have AMD CPUs. A few have said they were considering Ryzen but they still ended up on i7/i9s. None of them will even entertain the idea of purchasing a Radeon.
 
SmokeRngs said:
You're not going to get me to believe 4090s could ever be at the top of a best sellers list. There literally are not enough of them to make it to the top of a list like that.
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I could see foul play involved in newegg pushing some product or something else than actual sells (like people looking at the product page), but there would be also a situation that when you have over 215 different 3060 skus being sold, 125 sku of 3070s, etc... a specially popular 4090 model could end up high even if the 4090 has a whole sell 35 times less than those.
 

Nvidia RTX 3060 loses its crown as Valve's Steam survey returns to normal​

The RTX 3060 was king for just a month​


The massive 25.3% rise that saw Simplified Chinese become the top language on Steam was also wiped out last month, pushing English to the top spot again.

https://www.techspot.com/news/98521...-crown-valve-steam-survey.html#commentsOffset

Obviously some Chinese PCs got overrepresented in previous month's survey
 
Steam hardware survey results for the last 7 months:


Steam Hardware Survey (GPU distribution)
Header Cell - Column 0JulAugSepOctNovDecJan
Ampere26.5%27.6%28.9%33.0%27.3%25.9%26.0%
Pascal14.6%18.9%18.4%15.7%17.9%16.5%16.2%
Turing17.2%17.0%17.8%18.8%15.8%15.2%14.6%
Ada Lovelace3.7%5.7%6.7%9.5%9.0%9.1%10.3%
RDNA 22.8%3.0%2.8%2.1%3.3%3.3%3.4%
GCN 4.02.6%2.5%2.4%1.8%2.5%2.4%2.4%
Maxwell2.3%2.1%2.0%1.5%1.9%1.8%1.7%
GCN 5.01.2%1.1%0.9%0.7%0.9%0.9%0.9%
Kepler0.6%0.6%0.6%0.4%0.5%0.5%0.5%
RDNA0.5%0.5%0.4%0.3%0.5%0.4%0.4%
RDNA 30.2%0.2%0.2%0.2%0.3%0.3%0.3%

https://www.pcgamer.com/radeon-grap...re-at-least-according-to-the-steam-hw-survey/
 
I did one of these recently the updated the format on answering questions or it does it automatically.
I haven't done one in a few years I think.
 
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