Gamers desert Intel in droves, as Steam share plummets from 81% to 55.6% in just five years
Gamers desert Intel in droves, as Steam share plummets from 81% to 55.6% in just five years
Gamers desert Intel in droves, as Steam share plummets from 81% to 55.6% in just five years
Gamers desert Intel in droves, as Steam share plummets from 81% to 55.6% in just five years
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>Meanwhile, AMD’s share has climbed from 19% to 44.42%, with Ryzen chips dominating Amazon’s CPU best sellers chart.
>Following the underwhelming launch of Intel’s Arrow Lake Core Ultra CPUs, which generally showed gaming performance actually decreasing compared to its previous Raptor Lake CPUs, gamers are seemingly voting with their wallets and buying AMD chips instead.
>In just five years, Intel’s domination in the gaming CPU market has seemingly crumbled, and you can point to several reasons why. For one, Intel’s 14th-gen Raptor Lake CPUs were plagued by stability problems over the last couple of years
>In the meantime, AMD has unleashed a relentless tide of new Zen CPUs, and its X3D chips with 3D V-cache have proved immensely popular, offering unparalleled performance in games.
Intel’s CES 2026 showing will probably be their last chance to get it right after a long period of self sabotage.
If you exclude laptops it should be more drastic
my first thought was, since when has Steam shares and why is its value dropping because of Intel? 😉
No one wants to pay $700 for a CPU that hits 90c by looking at it funny.
Maybe Intel should only do two sockets per decade.
For gaming AMD is simply faster. It makes little sense to go Intel. It also doesn’t help that Intel is nor more difficult to cool and has degradation problems if that cooling is inadequate.
Still, if you do non gaming work, it’s more of a toss up. Intel is technically better, but thermals, noise from thermal management, and long term reliability is a problem. Until Intel fixes this, they are faster but almost not in the running anyways. Our last work computer upgrades used 9950X instead explicitly because of thermals. I’ve got a 14900K at home. I know what’s required for cooling and long term stability. Intel needs to fix their heat problem though a fundamental design change. Until they do, this is their hard limit. It’s also a deal breaker for business applications in my eyes.
If i were to build a new computer today, it would not be an intel. I would still buy one used.
I wonder if part of that is also backlash against the nvidia GPUs. I’m a little out of pocket on my gaming pc hardware, but iirc amd compliments its own CPU with its own GPUs really well and I haven’t heard anything about AMD GPUs being 5k yet.
Id go back to intel if they weren’t trash. I hate how my 9950x3d behaves with its sudden boosting and temp jumps. But it does perform
Im the only person amongst my friends who has hopped from a lifetime of amd to try a intel chip.
AMD are cheaper, run cooler, have a more user friendly socket/cooler mount, and didn’t ship 2 whole generations of processors with faulty microcode that caused permanent damage and instability to the CPU.
Their 13th gen fumble took my desktop out of commission for over a month before I could get a replacement CPU. That combined with them laying off a ton of talent and getting a government bail out, Intel is pretty much dead to me at this point and I have little confidence they will be able to provide a competitive offering to AMD any time this decade.
Turns out consumers are more likely to buy the better product.
im pretty sure the stock buybacks are working fine
I wish this happened to Nvidia and their GPU’s, but that’s a near impossible task for 2 main reasons: worldwide supply chain for desktop and laptop (market penetration) and a significantly better (faster) product than the competition, let alone perks like DLSS and RT, that leaves the rest still playing catchup.
3d cache, good value Cpus for under $300, long term support platforms, AMD has a lot going for it
What this article doesn’t dive into:
The number of Steam Users who build their own PCs (about 1/3 according to some studies I found)
Vs
The number of prebuilt desktop users and laptop users that make up the other 2/3rds. Are they buying based on Intel vs AMD processors, or other hardware stats? Or are they buying their machine based on cost and availability?
– For at least that second point the question is then why the prebuild company is choosing Intel vs AMD for their retail units, and how this is affecting the market as a whole.
In short – how much is this trend due to the retail user vs the wholesale purchasers of these chips?
Intel lied about diode oxidation in the cpus for years. Despite the gamer community finding and reporting it for years. I was a massive intel fan. I only bought their cpu’s to build my computers for 20 years. I trusted their quality. Now, I’ll probably never buy their product again unless it’s a last resort. I’m not going to support a company that release multiple faulty CPU’s over a few years knowingly.
Gamers should be deserting nVidia.
What a confusing article title.. Gamers desert Intel in droves, as STEAM reports users of INTEL plummets from 81% to 55.6% in just five yers.
FTFY.
I bet this shit title was written by the so called “AI”
Back in 2008 the guy that built my first custom PC called intel “The Mercedes of CPUs”.
Nowadays, it’s called the same. As, you pay more, does the same exact thing as rival brands and you’re getting the feeling you’re paying just for a brand rather than a good product for such tier of expense.
Regardless of AMD’s performance gains, the other big this was that they simply started producing reliable hardware. Back in the Bulldozer days, even their chipsets were fucking awful and fraught with issues that put many off. I tried troubleshooting a friends PC for months that had a FX8300 and a Radeon R9 290x – the GPU wouldn’t get out of 1x PCI-e link speed. If you funked with the PCI-E speed in the BIOS, it would work, then at the next reboot it’d stop working again. Just insane.
I was staunchly Intel for years because they always ‘just worked’ without any weird issues. Even in the early years of Ryzen, chipsets and motherboards were still janky, with a friend of mine having countless issues with his machine to the point that he simply gave up on it.
Somewhere, in the land of UserBenchmark, there’s a lot of fumes appearing out of thin air.
I’ve been with AMD on desktop for a while. I love my AMD desktop chips but I always seem to have problems with crashes with the PC because of various sleep state issues. Similar problems I had with an older 3700X build and with my new 9950X3D build, eventually solved both by disabling sleep states.
Because of that experience I’ve always picked Intel for laptops.
Can’t believe it took so long. Can take a crazy amount of time to show people that alternatives can be superior over a dominant product. I remember the Intel Pentium pro 4 days where it was this slow expensive beast sucking outrageous amounts of power (for the time) while the AMD Athlon chip was the faster, cheaper and all around better cpu and people would look at you like you were insane if you recommend it to them.
can confirm, this is the first time in 20 years I have a computer with an AMD (X3D) chipset.
Well Intel started producing garbage processors with tons of problems while AMD produced reasonably priced CPU’s that perform amazingly. Doesn’t take a phd to figure this one out.