Valve’s Steam hardware survey was just updated, and one of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3060, one of the best graphics cards, showed up on the charts for the first time. Sure, it has a very minute 0.17% market share at the time of this writing, but the card only launched in late February. Every Ampere GPU now at least shows up, which makes us wonder where AMD’s RX 6000 series GPUs are hiding.
It’s no secret that Nvidia is pumping out a far greater volume of Ampere graphics cards compared to AMD and its competition RDNA2 products. AMD has to split its allotment of TSMC 7nm wafers between the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Ryzen 5000 CPUs, and Radeon 6000 GPUs. AMD’s contractually obligated to provide a lot of console chips, relative to the others, so guess which product line gets the short end of the stick.
AMD CEO Lisa Su is aware of the problem as she has promised to ramp up production significantly for the Radeon RX 6700 XT after it launched. And to be fair, it’s only been out a bit less than two months. However, it seems RX 6700 XT production still isn’t competitive with even the lowest stock of Nvidia’s GPUs.
Looking at eBay’s sold listings for the RTX 3060 and RX 6700 XT, which is what we do in our GPU pricing index, scalpers are selling off literally double the number of 3060s compared to RX 6700 XTs. Just this week alone, 382 RTX 3060s and 182 RX 6700 XTs were sold off to buyers. There were also 734 RTX 3070 cards sold, at an average price of $1,371.
These numbers from eBay should give us a good guess as to the production numbers of AMD and Nvidia worldwide. If these numbers are at all accurate, it helps explain why Steam hasn’t put any RX 6000 series GPU on its hardware survey list.
Steam has never told us how it operates the hardware survey program and what requirements hardware models have to meet to be on the chart. However, looking at the charts, we believe there’s a market share limit in place that all products on the charts have to meet. It may change a bit month to month, but right now the minimum value to show up as a line item is 0.15%. Considering Nvidia’s RTX 3060 has 0.17% and appears to be selling at roughly twice the rate of the RX 6700 XT, that would put AMD’s best RDNA2 share at less than 0.10%.
Again, there’s some conjecture on our part, but this suggests Steam simply needs more of AMD’s RX 6000 series graphics cards before they’ll breach the 0.14% market share point. The RX 6700 XT has also been selling at nearly triple the rate of the other RX 6000 series cards — since launch, on eBay at least, RX 6700 XT alone outsold the combined RX 6900 XT, RX 6800 XT, and RX 6800.
This certainly isn’t good news for AMD, though it’s regretably expected. There were rumors that 80% of the wafers AMD uses at TSMC right now are for the latest consoles, leaving Ryzen and Radeon to share the remaining 20%. Nvidia meanwhile only has to produce GPU wafers at Samsung, and while it can’t keep up with demand, it appears to be doing a much better jump at shipping cards than AMD. In general, Nvidia looks like it’s outselling AMD GPUs by at least a 5-to-1 ratio.
Hopefully, something will change so that AMD’s more budget-friendly RDNA2 products can be more competitive in production volume with Nvidia’s Ampere GPUs. But while we wait for RX 6700, RX 6600, and RX 6500 products to launch, there are strong indications Nvidia will have RTX 3050 Ti and RTX 3050 laptops this month, and likely RTX 3080 Ti desktop cards as well.