Last month we warned that the RTX 5070’s sudden coronation looked more like a language-mix story than a buying spree. October’s numbers back that up. The five-year-old RTX 3060 has pulled level with NVIDIA’s current midrange card at the top of Valve’s chart.
On the video card breakdown for the October 2026 Steam Hardware & Software Survey, the RTX 3060 and RTX 5070 each sit at 3.78%. The 3060 gained 0.12 points. The 5070 dropped 2.37 points from September’s 6.15%, which puts it back near its July and August levels. The RTX 4060 Laptop GPU (3.60%) and desktop RTX 4060 (3.51%) round out the top four.
The cause is easy to spot on the survey’s main page. Simplified Chinese fell 9.41 points to 21.98%, while English rose 4.84 points to 39.04%. Those language swings have pushed the GPU chart around all year, and that is why we flagged them in our September Steam Survey analysis. 16GB systems climbed 3.60 points to 41.42% and retook first place. 32GB fell 5.16 points to 37.06%. Elsewhere, Windows 11 reached 72.51% (up 1.17 points) and Windows 10 slipped to 21.11%. Linux rose 0.90 points to 3.95%, with CachyOS leading the distro list at 0.65%.
Read alongside our August Steam Survey breakdown, the trend is clear. September was the outlier, not the new normal. The RTX 5070 is selling, but not fast enough to bury a card that was a mainstream staple long before the memory crunch. The RAM figure is the more telling one. A swing back toward 16GB fits a market where new kits cost real money, and where many gamers are now asking “what can I keep?” rather than “what should I upgrade to?” With RTX 50 pricing still inflated in some regions, as in our report on 144% markups in Japan, an old-guard GPU at the top is unsurprising.
As always, Steam’s opt-in sampling is noisy month to month. Watch whether the 5070 breaks the tie in November, when holiday buying and Valve’s sampling mix both shift. Let us know your thoughts in the forums.
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