Radeon RX 9070 XT Dethrones Older GPUs As Steam's Top AMD Card
Valve's updated Steam hardware survey for the month of August reveals an interesting development within Team Red's camp. Serving as a notable milestone for AMD's graphics lineup, the company's flagship Radeon RX 9070 XT is now its most popular discrete GPU on Steam, after having climbed over previous generation hardware to get there.
Of course, we're talking about relatively small, incremental gains. As it stands, the Radeon RX 9070 XT captured a 1.46% share among Steam users who were invited to participate in the survey and who opted in for August. That's up from 1.4% in July, 1.35% in June, and 1.33% in May.
That is as far back as we can go, because prior to May, AMD's top consumer gaming GPU was not in use by enough gamers to register a blip on the monthly survey.
So how does that stack up? If looking solely at AMD's discrete GPUs, the current breakdown is as follows:
- Radeon RX 9070 XT: 1.46%
- Radeon RX 6600: 0.83%
- Radeon RX 9060 XT: 0.8%
- Radeon RX 7800 XT: 0.63%
- Radeon RX 580 (2,048 steam processors): 0.57%
- Radeon RX 580 (2,304 stream processors): 0.58%
Valve distinguishes between the two variants of AMD's older Radeon RX 580, but even if clumping them together, the surveyed usage still falls below the Radeon RX 9070 XT.
Could this be a turning point for AMD? Cards based on AMD's previous generation RDNA architectures largely failed to gain mainstream traction on Steam, if going by the survey results. It's feasible that improved ray-tracing performance and FSR 4 AI upscaling helped propel the Radeon RX 9070 XT to a higher spot.
What's also interesting is that Steam's survey results have typically identified less expensive cards as being the most popular. To put it into perspective, NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3060 is still the top-used discrete card on Steam at 3.92%, followed by the GeForce RTX 4060 in mobile form (3.84%), the GeForce RTX 5070 (3.77%), the GeForce RTX 4060 (3.6%), and the GeForce RTX 3050 (3.21%). You have to scroll way down before getting to NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 5090, which is holding steady at 0.43%.
The other thing worth highlighting is that despite the Radeon RX 9070 XT's gains in recent months, AMD overall trails its rival. The top 15 spots are all NVIDIA, including the now-ancient GeForce GTX 1650 (2.49%). And if you remove integrated graphics from the rankings, NVIDIA's GPUs account for the top 21 spots.
