Kudos to the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX. Nearly nine months after the new RDNA 3 graphics architecture was announced, the RX 7900 XTX is the first example of a GPU featuring AMD's latest graphics technology to appear in Valve's survey of Steam users.

If this is good news for AMD, the bad news is that its graphics cards represent just 8.68% of Steam gamers. Ouch. Of course, there are a few caveats. First, this is AMD's discrete GPUs and does not include integrated GPUs like those found in the Steam Deck or AMD's APUs.

Additionally, 10.69% of all GPUs, including both discrete and integrated, fall into the general "other" category. Presumably this is a mix of unidentified graphics cards and iGPUs, and furthermore, Valve has not bothered to list them because their market share is so small.

However, assuming AMD's 10+ percent share of the "other" category is similar to the share of specific GPUs, AMD's overall footprint would be only about 10 percent at best. Nvidia, on the other hand, accounts for about 75% of the graphics cards registered on Steam, with integrated GPUs from Intel and AMD making up the rest.

And Intel's Arc graphics cards do not appear in this survey at all, and fall into the perhaps too small category of "other."

Incidentally, the Van Gogh GPU is known as the AMD graphics integrated in Valve's Steam Deck and is currently the third most popular AMD GPU on this list.

For the record, the Steam Deck represents 0.82% of Steam gamers. This doesn't sound like a lot on the surface, but given that Steam has between 100 and 150 million monthly users, there are actually quite a few decks out there.

Of course, the Steam survey is not a fully coordinated and controlled survey. It relies on Steam gamers opting in and hardware being correctly identified. Indeed, the survey has been plagued by some fairly obvious anomalies in the past, such as RTX 3060 suddenly jumping to 10% of users in April before returning to a more reasonable 4.66% in May.

However, once one understands its limitations and the background behind the numbers, it remains a very useful guide to which hardware gamers are using. It also does not make good reading for AMD.