Steam conducts a monthly survey to collect information regarding the hardware being used by its users. TheRankings has made a YouTube video compressing the most ubiquitous GPUs over the past 15 years into a 3-minute video starting from April of 2004 to March 2019.
In April ’04, we see a healthy competition between ATI (AMD acquired ATI in 2006 and have ceased using the ATI branding since 2010) and NVIDIA. However, even back in 2004, NVIDIA was leading the market with 28% of all Steam users using the GeForce4 and the GeForce4MX. ATI makes a small comeback in 2005 with the Radeon 9800 and the 9600 staying ahead for most of the year.
Further reading:
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However, after the GeForce 6600 is released in Q2 2006, NVIDIA again gained majority control. Following it up with the GeForce 8800 launch in ’07, most of the market share was held by NVIDIA’s GeForce 8800, 7600 and the 6600 till early 2010.
AMD hit back stronger with the HD 4000 and the HD 5000 series and maintained the top spot with the Radeon HD 4800 and the 5770 for a brief period of time. However, NVIDIA released the GTX 560 and the 560 Ti in 2011 and gained the top spot again.
Steam added Intel Integrated GPUs to their surveys in 2012 and with the huge amount of people using laptops, the Intel HD 3000 and 4000 series maintained the top stop from 2013 all the way to 2015.
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AMD falls out of the top spots and NVIDIA’s offerings dominate the PC Hardware Market
AMD started to struggle in 2014 and fell out completely in 2016. The GTX 9 Series made up most of the high-end and mid-range market share with the GTX 750Ti and the GTX 660Ti dominating the budget-oriented side. A few slots were taken up by Intel’s iGPUs but they aren’t nearly as ubiquitous as back in 2013.
NVIDIA’s Pascal lineup of GPUs bearing the GTX-10 series name have been the only dominant market force since they were launched back in 2016. The mid-range GeForce cards have been the most popular by far over the past 5-7 years and it’s looking like the trend is set to continue.
The video
With AMD’s Navi lineup coming this year and Intel’s discrete graphics set to hit the market next year, it’ll be interesting to see how the graph changes over the next few years. NVIDIA is set to face stiff competition from two of its biggest rivals and the GPU market is headed for some fun times ahead.
Further Reading:
- AMD Announces 2nd Gen Ryzen Pro and Athlon APUs
- Intel Steals Another AMD Lead for its Visual Technologies Team