Radeon RX 9070 XT Overtakes Older AMD GPUs to Become Steam's Most Popular Discrete Card
Valve's latest Steam hardware survey for August 2026 marks a significant milestone for AMD: the Radeon RX 9070 XT has officially become the company's most popular discrete graphics card on the platform, dethroning older models in terms of user share.
The shift is incremental but clear. In August, the Radeon RX 9070 XT captured a 1.46% share among Steam users who opted into the survey. This represents a steady climb from 1.4% in July, 1.35% in June, and 1.33% in May. Prior to May, AMD's top consumer GPU was not present in the survey data frequently enough to register a measurable blip.
When looking at the breakdown of AMD's discrete GPUs specifically, the Radeon RX 9070 XT leads with 1.46%, followed by the Radeon RX 6600 at 0.83%. The Radeon RX 9060 XT sits at 0.8%, while the Radeon RX 7800 XT holds 0.63%. Notably, even when combining the two variants of the legacy Radeon RX 580 (2,048 and 2,304 stream processors), their combined usage falls below that of the new flagship.
This achievement could signal a turning point for Team Red. Previous generations based on RDNA architectures largely failed to gain mainstream traction on Steam according to these metrics. Analysts suggest that improved ray-tracing performance and FSR 4 AI upscaling likely helped propel the Radeon RX 9070 XT to this higher spot, overcoming the historical preference for budget cards.
However, the broader context remains heavily skewed toward NVIDIA. The survey continues to identify less expensive cards as the most popular overall. NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3060 remains the top-used discrete card on Steam at 3.92%, followed by mobile variants of the RTX 4060 (3.84%) and desktop RTX 5070 (3.77%). Even NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 5090, despite its high-end status, holds a steady but lower share of 0.43%.
The disparity is stark when looking at the top rankings: all 15 top spots are occupied by NVIDIA GPUs, including the now-ancient GeForce GTX 1650 at 2.49%. If integrated graphics are removed from the equation, NVIDIA's GPUs account for the top 21 spots. While the steady climb of the Radeon RX 9070 XT highlights growing adoption for AMD's latest desktop GPUs, NVIDIA's current-generation Blackwell lineup and its past generation offerings maintain a massive lead in Valve's Steam survey.
Гика
