Nope - eben Steam is only a small subset of all gamers. Most gamers are on smartphones. Others are on consoles and many others are playing outside of steam. And you have to count the steam survey correctly and count the “Laptop GPU” as integrated.
But IMHO the problem is another: There is currently no sweet spot for a cheap and capable GPU like the 1050Ti was back in the day. Some people will spend thousands of dollar for a GPU, but GPUs have been really expensive for a long time due to bitcoin, Covid and AI. You can see that in the steam survey - some of the most popular cards like the 1050TI or 1060 are ancient.
That puts game companies in a really bad position: They could release games with fancy graphics, but only a small subset of games can run them on their rig. And producing a multimillion dollar game for 2000€+ devices is not a good business proposal.
In the discussion about the future of dGPUs being threatened by iGPUs I think it makes sense to consider only the devices for which dedicated GPUs are available or devices which exist as a dedicated alternative to the functionality provided by dedicated cards. That is to say you’ll never find a dGPU in a phone and the demographic of gamers playing on their phone, while a majority, is fundamentally different and with fundamentally different games available than on a PC or console.
While not all PC gaming happens through steam and not all steam players submit the automatic survey it is a reasonable representation of the hardware in use across the PC gaming space as a whole.
Integrated GPUs are those that are built into a CPU or SOC. Dedicated GPUs are separate chips with their own resources. Many gaming laptops have both integrated and dedicated GPUs. There are no integrated Nvidia GPUs in the PC space (though the switch has one). Something like a 980m from back in the day is a dedicated GPU even if it was soldered to the same motherboard (and not all of them were). Likewise modern 4xxx series chips allow laptop gamers to still have a dGPU on the go.
I’m not saying that iGPUs don’t have their place or can’t play games. I’m saying that dGPUs are better at what they do and will continue to be desired for that. At the end of the day they are both GPUs. They do the same thing, but one of them does it better. If you’re in a business or hobby that benefits from what GPUs were designed to do you will always want the one that can do it better.
Nope - eben Steam is only a small subset of all gamers. Most gamers are on smartphones. Others are on consoles and many others are playing outside of steam. And you have to count the steam survey correctly and count the “Laptop GPU” as integrated.
But IMHO the problem is another: There is currently no sweet spot for a cheap and capable GPU like the 1050Ti was back in the day. Some people will spend thousands of dollar for a GPU, but GPUs have been really expensive for a long time due to bitcoin, Covid and AI. You can see that in the steam survey - some of the most popular cards like the 1050TI or 1060 are ancient.
That puts game companies in a really bad position: They could release games with fancy graphics, but only a small subset of games can run them on their rig. And producing a multimillion dollar game for 2000€+ devices is not a good business proposal.
In the discussion about the future of dGPUs being threatened by iGPUs I think it makes sense to consider only the devices for which dedicated GPUs are available or devices which exist as a dedicated alternative to the functionality provided by dedicated cards. That is to say you’ll never find a dGPU in a phone and the demographic of gamers playing on their phone, while a majority, is fundamentally different and with fundamentally different games available than on a PC or console.
While not all PC gaming happens through steam and not all steam players submit the automatic survey it is a reasonable representation of the hardware in use across the PC gaming space as a whole.
Integrated GPUs are those that are built into a CPU or SOC. Dedicated GPUs are separate chips with their own resources. Many gaming laptops have both integrated and dedicated GPUs. There are no integrated Nvidia GPUs in the PC space (though the switch has one). Something like a 980m from back in the day is a dedicated GPU even if it was soldered to the same motherboard (and not all of them were). Likewise modern 4xxx series chips allow laptop gamers to still have a dGPU on the go.
I’m not saying that iGPUs don’t have their place or can’t play games. I’m saying that dGPUs are better at what they do and will continue to be desired for that. At the end of the day they are both GPUs. They do the same thing, but one of them does it better. If you’re in a business or hobby that benefits from what GPUs were designed to do you will always want the one that can do it better.