When we wrapped up the August survey, we said September’s numbers would arrive in early October. Valve has delivered. At first glance, this looks like the month Blackwell finally took over Steam. At second glance, it looks a lot like February.
Per Valve’s combined survey data, the GeForce RTX 5070 jumped 2.30 points to 5.86%. That takes first place from the RTX 3060, which slipped to 3.54%. The RTX 5060 gained 1.22 points to reach 4.20%, and the RTX 5060 Ti added 1.46 points to reach 3.87%. Those are the three biggest movers on the chart by a wide margin. Nothing else in the top ten gained even half a point.
In August, the 5070 sat third at 3.56%, and its 0.16-point gain was the largest near the top of the chart. September’s gain is more than fourteen times that. Real installed bases do not move like that in 30 days, least of all in a year when GPU pricing came apart.
The share of respondents running Steam in Simplified Chinese jumped 7.42 points to 31.39%. English fell 4.05 points to 34.20%. Nearly everything else that moved sharply in September moved the way a large influx of Chinese desktop systems has pushed the data before:
- 32GB system RAM rose 4.77 points to 42.22%, retaking first place from 16GB (37.82%, down 3.38).
- 1440p rose 5.18 points to 27.04%, while 1080p dropped 2.61 points to 47.91%, below half the combined sample.
- AMD’s Windows CPU share rose 1.89 points to 47.41% on Valve’s processor table. AMD’s 3.7GHz-and-above clock bin was up 3.74 points, and AVX-512 support rose 3.56 points to 27.46%.
- Linux fell 0.85 points to 3.05%. SteamOS Holo dropped to 0.53%, which leaves CachyOS (0.55%) narrowly ahead of Valve’s own OS.
- Systems with more than 4TB of free disk space jumped 4.06 points to 7.28%.
We have seen this before. In our March write-up, we flagged February’s 9.42% reading for the RTX 5070, which fell back to 2.87% a month later. February also saw a roughly 20-point swing in 32GB systems, and we pointed to Chinese New Year skewing the sample. In August, a 1.45-point Simplified Chinese bump earned a passing mention. On Valve’s Windows video card table, the RTX 5070 read 3.09%, 3.29%, 3.62%, and 3.77% from May through August, then 6.15% in September. The RTX 5060 Ti went 2.06%, 2.26%, 2.40%, 2.55%, then 4.06%.
Radeon numbers slipped slightly. The RX 9070 XT dipped 0.02 points to 1.35%, the RX 9060 XT sits at 0.73%, and the generic “AMD Radeon Graphics” bucket fell 0.36 points. Read that as dilution by an NVIDIA-heavy desktop sample, not RDNA 4 losing ground. The 9070 XT is still the top named AMD card, so August’s Radeon crown stands.
On CPUs, AMD’s 1.89-point gain is the biggest single-month move we have recorded in this series. The AVX-512 jump also points to newer Ryzen parts, which support the instruction set while Intel’s recent consumer chips do not. For what those newer Ryzen chips deliver, see our Ryzen 7 7700X3D vs 9800X3D review.
If the RTX 5070 holds near 6% and Simplified Chinese falls back toward August’s 24% range, the crown is real. If both snap back, September joins February in the asterisk file. Either way, the five-month trend says the 5070 will pass the RTX 3060 on its own eventually; it just did not happen like this. We will have October’s numbers in early November. Let us know in the forums whether your rig got the survey pop-up this month.
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