The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT has been one of the best-selling GPUs on the market for months. You wouldn't have known it from the Steam Hardware Survey.
Valve's May survey update changed that. The RX 9070 XT now sits at 1.33% of Steam users, placing it 23rd among discrete GPUs. For a card that had essentially been a ghost in previous survey results, that's a significant appearance.
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From invisible to 23rd place overnight
The jump from zero representation to 1.33% in a single month isn't the RX 9070 XT suddenly flooding the market. The card has been on sale since early 2025. What changed is almost certainly how Valve (or AMD) is categorizing and tagging the GPU's data.
Here's the thing: the May survey shows the generic "AMD Radeon(TM) Graphics" category dropped from 2.37% in April down to 0.90%. That's a fall of roughly 1.47%, which lines up almost exactly with the 1.33% the RX 9070 XT picked up. The math is pretty hard to argue with.
For months, a significant chunk of RX 9070 XT owners were being bucketed into that catch-all generic Radeon label instead of their specific card being identified. The gap between the two figures (1.47% lost vs 1.33% gained) can be chalked up to driver adoption rates and the possibility that other RDNA 4 GPUs also benefited from the same data fix.
What the survey data actually tells us
The Steam Hardware Survey has a well-documented history of quirks. Chinese Lunar New Year has historically skewed GPU share figures for a month before snapping back. VRAM reporting errors have been acknowledged by Valve directly. This latest correction feels different, though, because it aligns with what the broader market has been showing for some time.
The RX 9070 XT has been sitting at the top of Amazon's GPU bestseller charts, with models from Gigabyte and others consistently ranking as the most popular graphics cards available. The idea that a card dominating sales charts had almost no Steam presence was always hard to square.
Valve lists the top 100 GPUs in the survey, currently reaching down to the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT at 0.17%. The RX 9070 XT's 1.33% puts it well inside that list and in a position that actually reflects its real-world adoption.
What this means for players watching the GPU market
For anyone tracking the PC hardware space, corrected survey data matters. The Steam Hardware Survey is one of the few large-scale, real-world snapshots of what GPUs are actually running games. When a popular card goes uncounted, it distorts the picture for developers optimizing for specific hardware targets and for anyone trying to read where the market is heading.
The RX 9070 XT landing at 23rd overall is still modest for a card that's been a consistent bestseller, but it's a starting point that reflects reality rather than a data artifact. As more owners update to drivers that report the card correctly, that number should keep climbing in future surveys.
The key here is that RDNA 4 adoption was always stronger than the survey suggested. This correction doesn't change how the card performs, but it does give a more honest read on how many Steam gamers are running it. If you're optimizing your PC setup around current GPU trends, our 007 First Light PC settings guide covers exactly how to dial in performance across different GPU tiers including recent AMD hardware.
The next few monthly surveys will be worth watching. If the generic Radeon category continues to shrink while specific RDNA 4 cards gain share, it confirms the fix is working as intended. For more GPU-specific performance tuning across current titles, our guides hub has options covering a range of hardware setups, including our Road to Vostok PC performance guide for anyone chasing better frame rates on mid-range AMD cards.
