AMD doesn’t look so hot on the Steam Hardware Survey (SHS), but the company is urging people not to take that data too seriously. In an interview with Hot Hardware about how AMD “jebaited” NVIDIA into lowering its GPU prices, Radeon VP And GM Scott Herkelman talked about a bug in the SHS that led to “a systemic undercount in AMD systems that persists to the present day.”
The problem is “all related to iCafes.” Herkelman claims that the survey “went nuts” back in 2017 and assumed that each and every login at an iCafe was unique, which led to multiple copies of the identical system configurations being uploaded to Steam. AMD doesn’t have much of a presence at these locations to begin with.
“They did change their algorithm a little bit, but they really aren’t motivated to go in and change this,” Herkelman said, “because the purpose of their data is not for market share. The purpose of their data is to show general trends to game developers… it definitely doesn’t track our real share…. you can see the same thing actually happen in our CPU share. It’s still under-represented, it’s the same exact curve, and it’s all related to iCafes.”