Since the beginning of the year, AMD had been slowly chipping away at Intel's share lead among gamers on Steam, but it all came crashing down in a month. The latest numbers show that Intel has regained all the share it lost this year.

It's not a huge month-to-month swing, just a few percentage points, but it's an interesting trend and likely reflects the short-term unavailability of AMD's best CPUs for gaming (the Ryzen 5000 series), based on the Zen 3. Even now, the Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X are out of stock on Amazon and Newegg, with marketplace sellers only listing them at inflated prices.

While Steam's hardware survey is not entirely scientific, it is the best snapshot of PC gaming hardware trends: in the June survey, Intel took a 1.72% share from AMD to 71.58%. This is a change of 3.44% (Intel up 1.72%, AMD down 1.72%).

Although not shown in the figure, Intel's market share in January of this year was 66.51%, while AMD's was 33.49%. This means that in the first half of this year, Intel managed to increase its market share by another 5% at the expense of AMD. This equates to a 10% change in CPU share among Steam gamers.

This is somewhat surprising, as the positive response to the Zen 3 was deserved. Even though the top two SKUs were hard to find, the more affordable Ryzen 7 5800X and Ryzen 5 5600X are more readily available (plus the OEM-only SKUs Ryzen 9 5900 and Ryzen 7 5800).

Steam's Hardware Survey does not provide a "why" or "how" when it comes to tracking hardware trends, only a "what." However, one has to assume that AMD's downturn and Intel's resurgence is a combination of silicon shortages and discounted prices for Core processors.

For example, the Core i7-10700K (Comet Lake). The Core i7-10700K (Comet Lake), which was priced at $380 at the beginning of the year, has now been reduced to $320 on Amazon; CamelCamelCamel's price tracking history shows a temporary drop to $260 last month. AMD and Intel's personalities It's as if they have suddenly switched, and now the latter is offering a bang-for-buck proposition.

The GPU shortage may also be a factor. Trying to build an entirely new PC from scratch is a daunting task. Also, for some time, the inventory of high-end power supplies has been unstable.

Speaking of graphics cards, the GeForce GTX 1060 has held steady as the most used GPU on Steam, accounting for one in ten GPUs. It is followed by the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti. The top 12 are all from Nvidia, with AMD's Radeon RX 580 coming in at #13, followed by the GeForce RTX 3070.

There are signs that the GPU shortage is slowly easing. If this continues, it will be interesting to see how the situation changes by the end of the year, but next year will be even more interesting as Intel enters the discrete GPU fray.