Four months ago the Radeon RX 9070 XT did not appear in the Steam Hardware Survey at all. In our March write-up we noted that RDNA 4 was invisible, with only the plain RX 9070 charting at 0.16% in 99th place and the 9070 XT and 9060 series missing entirely. April told the same story. Valve has now published the August 2026 data, and the RX 9070 XT is the most popular named AMD graphics card on the platform.
The Radeon Number
Per Valve’s own survey page, the RX 9070 XT sits at 1.37%, up 0.06 points, in the combined data. Behind it are the RX 6600 at 0.78% and the RX 9060 XT at 0.75%, with the non-XT RX 9070 at 0.19%. That is a clean generational handover: AMD’s top three named cards on Steam are now two RDNA 4 parts and one RDNA 2 holdout on the way down.
AMD’s discrete presence is understated by Steam’s classification behavior, with generic entries like “AMD Radeon Graphics” at 1.79% and two separate “AMD Radeon(TM) Graphics” rows at 0.90% and 0.44% absorbing an unknown mix of hardware. Our own forum readers have pointed out for months that their Radeon systems seem to get surveyed less often than their GeForce ones.
The Laptop GPU Gave the Crown Back
In July we reported that a laptop GPU had topped the chart for the first time in survey history, with the RTX 4060 Laptop GPU at 3.81% edging the desktop RTX 3060 at 3.73%. That has reversed. August has the RTX 3060 back in first at 3.76%, up 0.05, with the RTX 4060 Laptop GPU second at 3.63%, up 0.19. So the mobile part is still growing, it just did not grow fast enough, and the six-year-old Ampere card that will not die has reclaimed the top slot.
Third is the interesting one. The RTX 5070 is at 3.56%, up 0.16 points, the largest monthly gain of any card near the top of the chart, and it has now passed the RTX 4060 at 3.42%. Current-generation Blackwell is finally accumulating share at a visible rate: RTX 5060 at 2.98% (+0.13), RTX 5060 Laptop GPU at 2.50% (+0.45), RTX 5060 Ti at 2.41% (+0.15), RTX 5070 Ti at 1.73%, RTX 5080 at 1.62%. The RTX 5090 sits at 0.41% and did not move, which tells you exactly what a $5,000-plus street price does to installed base.
The Two Milestones from July Both Widened
Our July survey piece flagged two crossovers so narrow we called them margin-of-error events. Both have since firmed up.
VRAM: 16 GB is now 26.92%, up a full 1.02 points, against 8 GB at 25.74%. The gap went from 0.58 points in July to 1.18 in August. 12 GB sits at 12.99%.
CPU cores: 8-core is 28.04%, up 0.19, against 6-core at 27.43%, down 0.09. The gap widened from 0.33 to 0.61 points, and 16-core posted a healthy +0.33 to 5.96%.
CPU vendors: AMD reached 45.52% of Windows systems, up 0.18 points, with Intel at 54.47%. In May we covered AMD crossing 45% at 44.97%. The gap is now 8.95 points and has narrowed in three of the last four months. On Linux, AMD holds 66.87%.
Everything else: Windows 11 is at 70.97% (+0.71) with Windows 10 down to 22.90%. Linux slipped to 3.90%. 1080p remains half the platform at 50.52% but keeps eroding, while 1440p climbed to 21.86% and 4K is still only 4.98%. System RAM has 16 GB at 41.20% and 32 GB at 37.45%, with the 8 GB tier dropping 0.52 points to 7.46%. Simplified Chinese jumped 1.45 points to 23.97%, which is the usual reminder that regional sampling swings drive a lot of month-to-month movement. VR headset share fell to 1.49%.
What This Actually Tells Us
AMD did not win the Radeon crown by outselling NVIDIA; it won it because the RX 9070 XT was the card people could actually buy at something resembling a sane price during a year when GPU pricing came apart. When we reviewed the SAPPHIRE NITRO+ RX 9070 XT at launch, the pitch was strong 1440p raster with FSR 4 closing the upscaling gap and ray tracing still a step behind. Eighteen months later that pitch is exactly what a shrinking upgrade market wants.
16 GB is pulling away as the standard GPU memory size right now, off the back of RTX 50 and RDNA 4 cards that shipped with it. But memory costs have pushed manufacturers toward smaller frame buffers, not larger ones, and there is no new consumer generation on the near horizon to keep the curve climbing. If 16 GB stalls out in the next few months, that is your signal that the memory crunch has reached the installed base and not just the price tags.
The RTX 3060, a card from 2021 is the most common GPU on the largest PC gaming platform on earth, in a year when almost nobody can justify an upgrade. We will have the September numbers when Valve posts them in early October. Let us know what your rig contributed to this month’s data in the comments below.
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