Intel Arc makes its Steam Hardware Survey debut

Intel has made a lot of news very quickly this week, some of it bad, some of it good. But if you’ve been watching the company’s gaming aspirations over the last few years, you might also want to peek over at the Steam Hardware Survey, an ever-present source for juicy hardware trends. There, Intel’s Arc GPU family just made its debut in November, with 0.19 percent of Steam gamers using it.

I should point out right away that this particular listing is not discrete graphics cards that are marketed under the Arc brand name. Nope, this is integrated graphics in new laptops with the latest Core Ultra series processors from Intel. And in that regard, they’re still far outmatched even among other integrated graphics from Intel itself, with Iris Xe, Intel HD, and various generations of Intel UHD graphics beating it out.

The highest ranking integrated graphics chip on the Steam list (spotted by KitGuru) is “AMD Radeon Graphics” at 2.05 percent for November. That’s a combination of many different chips (and confusingly listed separately from “AMD Radeon(TM) Graphics,” which is at 1.1 percent). As of now, no discrete Intel graphics card — of which there’s just one generation — has shown up on the list, with the least used among the 90 entries being the laptop version of Nvidia’s RTX 3080. Intel could certainly hope for better performance for its inexpensive GPUs after two years.

With all its integrated laptop graphics combined, Intel has 7.69 percent of the GPU market in Steam’s hardware survey. Considering that this survey self-selects for users who are focused on PC gaming (and much more disposed to buy desktops than the typical consumer), that’s actually pretty decent. Both Intel and AMD made gains versus last month, with AMD jumping 1.24 points up to 16.24 percent.

Unsurprisingly, Nvidia maintains its stranglehold on the GPU market among Steam users, with a 75.76 percent market share. The top 12 slots are all discrete Nvidia GPUs, dominated by the RTX 3060 at 5.03 percent. Nvidia and AMD are poised to release new discrete graphics cards early next year, but Intel has beaten them to the punch with the second-gen, budget-focused “Battlemage” Arc B580 releasing later in December.