AMD Explains Why It’s Under-Represented in the Steam Hardware Survey

[Tsing]

AMD doesn't look so hot on the Steam Hardware Survey (SHS), but the company is urging people not to take that data too seriously. In an interview with Hot Hardware about how AMD "jebaited" NVIDIA into lowering its GPU prices, Radeon VP And GM Scott Herkelman talked about a bug in the SHS that led to "a systemic undercount in AMD systems that persists to the present day."

The problem is "all related to iCafes." Herkelman claims that the survey "went nuts" back in 2017 and assumed that each and every login at an iCafe was unique, which led to multiple copies of the identical system configurations being uploaded to Steam. AMD doesn't have much of a presence at these locations to begin with.

“They did change their algorithm a little bit, but they really aren’t motivated to go in and change this,” Herkelman said, “because the purpose of their data is not for market share. The purpose of their data is to show general trends to game developers… it definitely doesn’t track our real share…. you can see the same thing actually happen in our CPU share. It’s still under-represented, it’s the same exact curve, and it’s all related to iCafes.”

 

[DrezKill]

"Imagine if you had 10 of your best friends over to play Steam games on your PC. Every single one of them logged in to their own accounts — which led to 10 copies of your system config being uploaded to the platform and counted as separate submissions."
Interesting. I hadn't heard about this. That looks like something that needs to be addressed. Surprised Valve doesn't seem to be more interested in having a correct set of data. Well, even if the numbers are wrong, it still tells us what we already know, that Intel and nVidia are in the majority of Steam users' systems. Would be nice to have some accurate data collection though, cuz I'd like to know how Ryzen has been changing the numbers.

 

[Grimlakin]

I mean... lets get a twitch survey of streamers? How many of them are using new AMD CPU's? I bet that number is a lot higher.


How about people doing video encoding or image editing? Think they are leaving Intel for AMD? I bet so if they know about the new CPU's mind you.