Although the 6600 also sold independently through retail, it was primarily popular among prebuilt gaming PC manufacturers. That doesn't mean it was particularly popular among gaming enthusiasts, you know in picking their favorite model, although it could have very well been, but the Steam Leaderboards are more about what prebuilt gaming PC manufacturers are selling the most of.
I bought a 6650 since it was the best price / performance card available at the time, and by a huge margin, which was important since this was in 2022 with its still crazy GPU prices.
I would argue that this is effect partially due to the finer segmentation of amd gpu models in each generation. The wider the spread, the harder it is for an individual model to get a high rank.
Also amd only recently started making competitive gpus and there are lots of 900/1000 gen nvidia cards still in use.
Half the "gamers" I am friends with play CoD on nVIDIA laptops, with a couple that wanted more serious with a PC and switched to AMD.
I personally have bounced between the two with no bias over many years. I just get what's best at the time and don't care about the label on them. Right now, AMD offerings are a clear winner. It's a no-brainer.
And as things have gone, it'll be nVIDIA's turn again at some point.
It gets problematic for "AI" & raytracing stuff. The latter isn't so important for specifically 6600 cards but having to mess with ROCm and building programs to your specific model is absolutely no fun.
Why is raytracing sought after? Wasn't there an article recently that its really only effective when used on old games? To be honest tho, I have no idea what it even is or does and have never noticed a difference in a game using it or not using it.
I more amazed the most used gpu on steam still isn't enough to crack the top 30. I assumed Steam represented most all PC gamers. Has AI really affected commercial work stations that much where most companies are buying work stations with high end gpu's? Or thst my understand that workstations generally didn't require anything more than an integrated gpu at most.