AMD loses traction and Windows 7 is back, baby: Steam survey June 2021 results

By Robert Carnevale
published

Windows 7 is eternal.

Razer Blade 15
Razer Blade 15 (Image credit: Windows Central)

What you need to know

  • Steam's hardware and software survey results for June 2021 are live.
  • Windows 7 (64 bit) has seen a 2.91% upsurge in market share.
  • AMD has lost its 30% share against Intel in the CPU sector.

Good things die hard, as can be evidenced by Windows 7's surge in PC gaming market share over the course of June 2021, according to Steam's latest survey results. The 64-bit version of the long-since-relevant operating system still commands 4.88% of the Steam userbase ecosphere, thanks to a 2.91% increase over the course of June. That means nearly 5% of gamers (or one out of every 20) are hellbent on sticking with Windows 7 through thick and thin, even though Windows 11 is officially out in the wild.

In less positive news for underdogs fighting to maintain their standings, AMD has lost its 30% share of the market against Intel in the CPU sector, dipping down to 28.41%.

Other interesting results from the hardware survey's June info include a mysterious spike in the "other" section of the VR category. "Other" went from a little over 1% in May to 14.48% in June. Meanwhile, the Oculus Quest 2 saw an 11.80% dropoff, signaling odd trends, odd stat tracking, or both in the VR sector.

It remains to be seen whether AMD will be able to reclaim its 30% and hold onto that figure for more than a month on the CPU end of its operations. Its stats are still nowhere near its primary competitor on the GPU side, hovering around 15%, while NVIDIA commands a hefty 76%. However, that's not a strict indicator of the quality of both companies' offerings; AMD and NVIDIA both make some of the best graphics cards, whether you want something like an RTX 3060 Ti or Radeon RX 6800.

Robert Carnevale
Robert Carnevale

Robert Carnevale is the News Editor for Windows Central. He's a big fan of Kinect (it lives on in his heart), Sonic the Hedgehog, and the legendary intersection of those two titans, Sonic Free Riders. He is the author of Cold War 2395. Have a useful tip? Send it to robert.carnevale@futurenet.com.

21 Comments
  • That'll be because there are still plenty of folks buying Intel CPUs and there are still some folks who are misguided in thinking by picking up a 10th gen CPU at low cost they are saving money in the long run. Well, in fact all they're saving is probably about $100 or so. Due to lack of PCI-E 4.0, which due to Direct Storage is going to sting in 2 years time or so. As faster the interconnect between NVME and GPU the lower the latency. The misguiding thinking comes in thinking Zen 3 pricing is ridiculously high... I guess they must have the memory of a Gold fish and forgotten how Intel has fleeced everyone YoY pre-Ryzen.
  • Good points. The Intel gains could also be driven by enterprise purchases: there's a big backlog there where companies, who skew more towards Intel than consumers, have had a hard time getting systems due to shortage and will still be purchasing upgrades at high volumes for many months. At the same time consumer purchasing, which is where the majority of AMD sales occur, is pulling back following the pandemic coming to an end.
  • @GraniteStateColin Good points, though I must point out the glaring flaw there... Enterprise laptops are often locked to a domain and down by group policy. Plus enterprise laptops often do not have discrete GPUs unless they are needed for day to day tasks - as these laptops are more expensive. So people are less likely gaming on a work / enterprise laptop 🙃. Secondly, the pandemic... I hate to depress you - is still in full swing. This is the quiet before the storm, cause there is a storm coming. All I'll say is 1) Look at the trajectory of the delta variant and 2)unlike the previous prevalent strain ... this bastardised strain causes hearing impairment such as tinnitus as a frigging symptom. So what happens when you have a cluster of reckless folks and those who are not taking the pandemic seriously... all clustered together in one location say a hospital? After this pandemic, all front line workers should be given CEO level bonuses and wages on par with high level execs imo. Because without their valiant efforts... I don't want to think were this planet would have been.
  • How many enterprise devices do you suspect are really participating in Steam hardware surveys? That's not something I would think to be majorly influencing things. I'm hopeful my when will be purchasing 50 or so AMD devices this year, but none will have Steam on them. It's certainly not like it was before, but AMD processors have had supply issues. Finding Ryzen 5000 CPUs still isn't a guarantee, especially if you want Ryzen 9. Plus, AMD is still struggling to get into laptops, especially outside of gaming brands. Those are probably more influential than business clients.
  • I don't think people are buying desktop Intel CPUs, I think people are buying more Intel laptops.
  • @Goncalo Duarte1 that'd be because OEMs have finally started giving AMD a fair shot in the laptop space. The logical explanation is ofc any ryzen APU below the 4000 series are pretty sub par (the other is tinfoil hattery). Also most high end AMD gaming laptops often have gaudy designs. Now with AMD advantage hopefully we will see more practical designs - slim, thin, ultraportable, laptops with decent amount of ports. However, if you extrapolate what you said it doesn't add up as if more people were buying Intel laptops then you'd see a slow decline month over month not a sharp one.
  • That's not happened though. AMD is limited to gaming laptops and a few mediocre machines with Zen 2. You aren't seeing high-end XPS, Yoga, or Zenbook with Ryzen, let alone Zen 3. Microsoft only offers one if its devices with AMD, and it's using a year-old chip.
  • I did say, most high end AMD gaming laptops have gaudy designs lol.
  • I have to be honest, the AMD laptops I purchased for my company have had problems so I'll be mixing in more Intel units because we've n not seen issues with those units. Actially during the pandemic I seen a major uptick in custom pc building but had an equal amount with Intel vs AMD requests. I have two more builds to do in the coming weeks.
  • @OMG55 most AMD laptops running Zen (2000 series), Zen + (3000 series) are pretty subpar to be honest. Ryzen only begun to shine laptops with Zen 2 (4000 series). When the 4000 series launched on laptops there werent many laptops running them. Fast forward to present day, there's quite a few now. hopefully with AMD's advantage programme there will be more in the future - especially since both GPUs and CPUs for AMD pretty good in terms of all round performance in laptops now.
  • Unfortunately that simply doesn't hold up. I happily bought a 10th gen Intel CPU as getting the 10700K for $273 including tax was a great buy, when it's around what the 10600K would have cost. At the time it offered better price/performance than AMD could offer. The big problem for AMD is that until recently they had nothing close to MSRP with an iGPU - which in the current climate is the only viable way to get a working computer without massively overpaying for a GPU, or buying a 7 year old buying a GPU you don't want in the long term at MSRP. That and stock of AMD CPUs wasn't great earlier this year, when Intel CPUs were very easy to find. As for PCI-e gen 4, it doesn't bother me. Read/write speeds may be faster but game launching and OS boot times aren't noticeably faster on my NVME drive vs the SATA drive in my old PC. Also GPUs are still far from saturating gen3 PCI-e x16 and even using a 3080 in a gen2 slot still doesn't result in a loss of performance more than around 5% vs gen4. As for Direct Storage, game development times are so long that it will likely be some time before that becomes vital for the games I might want to play - and probably long enough that I'll be upgrading anyway by then. It's going to take 4-5 years before we really get an answer (by which point the window will open for replacing it anyway), but I really doubt that I'll regret buying into 10th gen. It certainly was easier to justify for me when my previous builds are on another continent and the alternative was not having a desktop, but 10th gen made sense, still made sense considering the outlay and I don't think I'll be as disadvantaged as you've made out.
  • @skydiverian Not everyone has that amount of disposable cash. Especially since with the pandemic many have lost their jobs.
  • I have an Oculus Rift S which the Steam survey didn't want to detect ...
  • Could be simple availability.
    Intel makes their own CPUs whereas AMD is limited by other big players using tbe same foundries. (cough*Apple*cough)
    OEMs looking to ship product will ship whatever they can build. And its not as if Intel CPUs are unusable. Good enough is better than nothing.
  • Why did windows 7 an end of life OS gain market share?
  • I find it very unlikely that a significant number of existing gamers switched from Windows 10 to Windows 7 or new gamers started out using Windows 7. I suspect that this is just natural fluctuation in numbers caused by the methods used in gathering them. I don't think that you can really say that something is happening based on these numbers unless you see a trend over a significant amount of time or a very big change over a short time. This is neither.
  • Yeah I thought so too. It's probably just slightly more people with win 7 chose to participate this time. As this only happened last month.
  • I recently upgraded from a 4th generation i7 to a Ryzen 5600X. The AMD CPU was 30 Euros more than a comparable i5. The price didn't matter to me because I wanted to switch to AMD. If AMD would lower their prices, then maybe that would keep users from going with Intel.
  • Windows 7 is not eternal. It's old and proven to work. Which means a lot of gamers will have pirated copies of it and don't want to switch. Probably people without a lot of interest in technology, features, OS or anything similar.
  • Using an EOL OS is quite risky. They shouldn't cry if they end up being a victim in a mass hacker attack.
  • Lack of AMD CPU availability through most of late 2020/early 2021 hasn't helped