PC gamers are deserting Intel, as AMD Ryzen chips snatch market share

Demand for Intel CPUs has taken a big hit when it comes to PC gamers, with Steam users increasingly buying AMD Ryzen processors instead. While Intel CPUs still account for the majority of processors used in gaming PCs monitored by the Steam Hardware Survey, Intel has seen its share of Windows gamers tumble from 76.84% to 60.27% over the last five years, and if you take other platforms into account, Intel's share is now less than 60%.

The shift correlates with a tumultuous time for Intel, which has not only had to contend with the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D obliterating the performance of its latest Arrow Lake CPUs in games, but has also had to troubleshoot problems with its older CPUs. Numerous Intel CPU fixes have had to be issued over the last few months, as the company scrambled to stop its CPUs from crashing in games, and in some cases being irreparably damaged, by a voltage shift error.

It looks as though PC gamers are slowly but surely moving over to AMD as a result, with the latter company courting gamers with its X3D CPUs. These chips, such as the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, include an extra silicon die into which is incorporated a huge extra 64MB of cache, which can significantly improve gaming performance.

Step back to June 2024, and Intel's CPUs still commanded a 66.8% share of Steam gamers, compared to 23.16% for AMD, but the last year has seen a steady decline. There's also an anomalous blip in February 2025, when it looked as though Intel had recovered some share after the Arrow Lake launch, but the next four months quickly settled back down, and revealed the long-term trend of decline.

In our Intel Core Ultra 7 265K review, we were impressed by the low power draw and multi-threaded power of Intel's new Arrow Lake architecture, but its gaming performance was notably poor. Since then, an Intel Cyberpunk 2077 fix has improved performance in this game, while the new Intel 200S Boost feature can squeeze more performance out of the latest chips through overclocking. However, it looks as though the damage has been done for this generation.

Let's also not forget that, despite making substantial inroads over the last five years, with a market share of 40%, AMD is still the underdog, and Intel still dominates the Steam Survey. Intel will need to make big changes if it wants to reverse this decline, though. Maybe its forthcoming Nova Lake CPUs, which are rumored to have an Intel 3D V-cache equivalent, and up to 52 cores, will help here.

In the meantime, if you're looking to upgrade, check out our full guide on how to buy the best gaming CPU for your needs, where we take you through all our favorite options at a range of prices, as well as our guide to buying the best CPU cooler, so you can keep your chip cool.

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