'Gamers' departure from Intel' is also evident on Steam, with Intel's CPU market share plummeting from 81% to 55.6% in just five years
Steam, the PC gaming platform operated by Valve, publishes hardware and software statistics every month. The latest hardware statistics reveal that the percentage of users using Intel CPUs on Steam is gradually decreasing.
Steam Hardware & Software Survey
Gamers desert Intel in droves, as Steam share plummets from 81% to 55.6% in just five years | Club386
https://www.club386.com/gamers-desert-intel-steam-survey-december-2025/
Steam released the following statistics on CPUs used by users as of December 2025. As of December 2025, Intel's CPU market share was 55.58%, while AMD's was 44.42%. The oldest CPU manufacturer market share information published by Steam is from July 2024, when Intel's market share was 66.6%. This means that Intel's market share has dropped by more than 11 percentage points in one year and five months.
Technology media Club386 points out that five years ago, in December 2020, Intel's CPU market share was 81%. This means that Intel's CPU market share on Steam has dropped by 25.42 percentage points in just five years.
Club386 points out that one of the reasons gamers are continuing to move away from Intel is the Vmin shift issue that occurred with 13th and 14th generation Core processors. Club386 points out, 'First of all, Intel's 14th generation Raptor Lake CPUs have been plagued by stability issues for the past few years. This is the infamous Vmin shift issue, which causes some CPUs to experience a sudden voltage surge on the chip when loading. As a result, Unreal Engine-based games often crash and display a message that they are running out of VRAM, when in fact the issue is due to a performance degradation of the CPU.'
Intel finally admits that its 13th and 14th generation CPUs are experiencing issues due to its own design - GIGAZINE
The subsequent Arrow Lake processors offered ample performance for multi-threaded content creation, generated less heat and consumed significantly less power than Raptor Lake, but their gaming performance lagged behind not only the competition but also Intel's older chips.
Meanwhile, AMD released the X3D series with 3D VCache during this time, which proved to be extremely popular due to its superior performance in games, according to Club386.
AMD announces release date for Zen 5-based next-generation gaming processor 'AMD Ryzen X3D' - GIGAZINE
In fact, if you check the best-selling CPU rankings on Amazon, you'll find that only one Intel CPU is in the top 10. The Intel CPU that made it into the top 10 was the Intel Core Ultra 7 265K .
Amazon | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K | Intel | CPU Online Store
Club386 wrote, 'Intel still has a chance to turn this around. AMD was in a very tough spot until they released their first Zen chips, but then made a dramatic comeback. Intel will also have to hope for a turnaround with the release of their Nova Lake chips, which are rumored to have up to 52 cores and a huge last-level cache.'
Related Posts:
