Although the 6600 also sold independently through retail, it was primarily popular among prebuilt gaming PC manufacturers. That doesn’t mean it was particularly popular among gaming enthusiasts, you know in picking their favorite model, although it could have very well been, but the Steam Leaderboards are more about what prebuilt gaming PC manufacturers are selling the most of.
I bought a 6650 since it was the best price / performance card available at the time, and by a huge margin, which was important since this was in 2022 with its still crazy GPU prices.
I would say it’s a mix of pre-built and DIY builds and notebooks (which I assume so the majority of Steam users).
I would argue that this is effect partially due to the finer segmentation of amd gpu models in each generation. The wider the spread, the harder it is for an individual model to get a high rank.
Also amd only recently started making competitive gpus and there are lots of 900/1000 gen nvidia cards still in use.
But not having a single model in the top 30 Stream rankings… That’s really rough.
I guess yeah. Looking at the fact that some intel models made it in tho, it looks like laptops and prebuilts are a huge part of this ranking.
I think if you were to just look at direct sales for dedicated gpus, amd would look better.
Half the “gamers” I am friends with play CoD on nVIDIA laptops, with a couple that wanted more serious with a PC and switched to AMD.
I personally have bounced between the two with no bias over many years. I just get what’s best at the time and don’t care about the label on them. Right now, AMD offerings are a clear winner. It’s a no-brainer.
And as things have gone, it’ll be nVIDIA’s turn again at some point.
It gets problematic for “AI” & raytracing stuff. The latter isn’t so important for specifically 6600 cards but having to mess with ROCm and building programs to your specific model is absolutely no fun.
It gets problematic for “AI” & raytracing stuff.
Why is raytracing sought after? Wasn’t there an article recently that its really only effective when used on old games? To be honest tho, I have no idea what it even is or does and have never noticed a difference in a game using it or not using it.
Because you can get actually accurate lighting, shadows and reflections using ray tracing. Not sure why it should make sense only for old games.
Ray tracing renders things similar to how our eyes perceive light. You can look ups some rasterization vs ray tracing videos to get the gist of it.
Not sure why it should make sense only for old games.
I’ll try and find the post from a couple days ago that had an article about it. I only half read it because I wasn’t overly interested reading about games I don’t for see myself playing/playing again. The article was specifically about this tho and why I even asked.
It’s mainly to do with lighting and, while they are going and adding the tech to old games like Quake, Minecraft, and Doom, it is mostly a “future” tech that will hopefully take over other types of lighting in games the more accessible it is.
This is simplified but it adds more realistic lighting by actually having the different “rays” of light actually bounce off of and reflect surfaces much more accurately, more more computer intensively, than other lighting methods. There are a lot of RTX on/off videos out there, if you have a decent monitor you can tell the difference.
Right now Nvidia has better raytracing performance because they have dedicated cores for it, whereas AMD has raytracing but they’ve been playing catch-up to Nvidia.
Glad I got my 6700 XT when I did… good card, great price. … I did have to update my thermals, however.
I more amazed the most used gpu on steam still isn’t enough to crack the top 30. I assumed Steam represented most all PC gamers. Has AI really affected commercial work stations that much where most companies are buying work stations with high end gpu’s? Or thst my understand that workstations generally didn’t require anything more than an integrated gpu at most.
I ended up with a 6600XT (somewhat rare card now, but it’s a 6600 with a higher TDP) in my Linux rig. I was upgrading from a GTX 970.
I have been quite happy with performance since I only play at 1080p, though 8GB of VRAM can be problematic in flight simming.
Model aside, definitely worth the AMD switch on Linux, though.
