Valve's Steam Hardware & Software Survey for September 2026 lists the GeForce RTX 5070 as the most common graphics card among respondents, at 5.86% of systems. That is a gain of 2.30 percentage points in one month, the largest move anywhere in Valve's video card table.
The "most popular" label holds on both readings. The RTX 5070 has the largest share of any named card in the September 2026 results, and it also posted the largest month-over-month increase.
The only line above it is Valve's catch-all "Other" row at 8.82%, which groups every card too small to list on its own. Valve names 102 individual entries in that table.
The card doing the climbing carries 12GB of memory. NVIDIA's RTX 5070 family page lists 12GB of GDDR7 on a 192-bit bus, 6,144 CUDA cores and a 250W rating.
Steam's September 2026 video card table
| Graphics card | Share | Change |
|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 | 5.86% | +2.30% |
| NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 | 4.20% | +1.22% |
| NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti | 3.87% | +1.46% |
| NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 | 3.72% | +0.30% |
| NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 | 3.54% | -0.22% |
| NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU | 3.35% | -0.28% |
| NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 | 1.89% | +0.27% |
| NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti | 1.79% | +0.06% |
| AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT | 1.35% | -0.02% |
Blackwell desktop cards took the top three places and the three biggest gains. Almost everything older slipped.
Subtract Valve's own change column and the RTX 5070 stood at roughly 3.56% in August 2026. The leading named card then was the RTX 3060, at about 3.76%.
AMD barely moved. The Radeon RX 9070 XT sits at 1.35%, down 0.02 points, after Digital Citizen covered its first appearance in the survey at 1.33%.
Why 16GB ownership is only just ahead
| VRAM | Share | Change |
|---|---|---|
| 16 GB | 27.21% | +0.29% |
| 8 GB | 26.71% | +0.97% |
| 12 GB | 13.06% | +0.07% |
| 24 GB | 5.50% | +0.09% |
| 4 GB | 5.13% | -0.56% |
| 6 GB | 5.12% | -0.18% |
The 16GB bucket is the largest in the September 2026 VRAM table, at 27.21%. It leads 8GB by 0.50 percentage points.
The direction of travel is less flattering. The 8GB bucket gained 0.97 points in the month, more than three times the 0.29 points added by 16GB.
Add every bucket of 12GB or more and the total reaches 49.61%. Fewer than half of surveyed systems clear that line.
The 12GB figures do not line up
A 12GB card added 2.30 points of share in September 2026. The 12GB VRAM bucket added 0.07 points in the same month.
Valve publishes no explanation for that gap. It also does not cross-tabulate the two tables, so there is no way to reconcile them from the survey page.
Memory capacity is the running argument of this generation. Digital Citizen reported that Micron ended production of the 2GB GDDR7 chips used across RTX 50 series boards, and that RTX Mega Geometry 2.0 streams ray tracing geometry into VRAM as needed.
What the survey measures, and what it does not
Valve describes this as a monthly survey and says participation "is optional, and anonymous". It is therefore a snapshot of Steam accounts that opted in during September 2026, not a count of cards sold or shipped.
Valve publishes percentages only. There are no absolute totals for respondents, systems or cards, no stated sample size and no margin of error.
There is also no regional or account-type breakdown, so shared and internet cafe machines cannot be separated from personal PCs. Valve has said before that cyber cafes were being over counted, and that it changed its counting method in April 2018.
The respondent mix moved hard in September 2026. Simplified Chinese rose 7.42 points to 31.39% of the survey, while English fell 4.05 points to 34.20%.
Other tables swung with it. The 2560 x 1440 resolution gained 5.18 points to 27.04%, and 32GB of system RAM gained 4.77 points to 42.22%.
NVIDIA announced the RTX 5070 at $549 and the 16GB RTX 5070 Ti at $749 in its Blackwell launch release, with both due in February 2025. Its current product pages show a "Starting at $XXX.XX" placeholder rather than a live price, and the company publishes no unit sales figures.
So none of this converts into cards shipped, and rising memory costs have already pushed graphics card prices up in China. Valve refreshes the survey every month, and the October 2026 figures are the next test of whether the jump holds.
Discussion (0)
Be the first to comment.