Radeon RX 9070 XT Pops On Valve's Steam Survey, What Caused The Spike?

AMD's Radeon RX 9070 XT is a fine graphics card, even if not quite as fast as NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 5090. It's certainly more affordable, and so the card's absence on Valve's Steam hardware survey up to this point has been a curious anomaly. So too is the Radeon RX 9070 XT's sudden surge in ownership, as the latest Steam survey seemingly indicates. But did AMD's top consumer graphics card really see a spike in sales, as the numbers hint?

Let's start with the data. After being a no-show on the Steam survey since the Radeon RX 9070 XT debuted over a year ago, the latest results have it sitting at 1.33%. Sure, that is a seemingly small figure, until you consider that the top spot occupied by the GeForce RTX 3060 is at 4.02%.

The Radeon RX 9070 XT now sits in spot number 25, just a hair below cards like the GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 5080, both of which are at 1.47% for the latest results. Just as importantly, it is the only specific Radeon model to be listed in the top 30 spots. The next one is the Radeon RX 6600, which sits in 32nd place at 0.90%.

So, why the sudden surge? Part of the reason could be the recent sale prices on select models. We've highlighted multiple deals on the Radeon RX 9070 XT, such as when Gigabyte's factory overclocked Gaming OC model dropped $90 to $649.99 at Amazon earlier this month, putting it within striking distance of AMD's $599 suggested pricing.

It's now back up to $739.99, but there are a few other models that are still on sale for below $700. They are all still higher than AMD's baseline pricing, but scoring a Radeon RX 9070 XT for $599 has been a difficult mission since release.

Even though MSRP pricing remains elusive, the recent discounts may have contributed to an uptick in usage on Steam. However, there's another possible explanation. As spotted by the folks at PC Gamer, a catch-all 'AMD Radeon(TM) Graphics' entry that consistently tracks on Steam's monthly survey has fallen a bit over the past several months.

That entry fell from 2.37% in April to 0.90% in May, a difference of 1.47%. It's plausible that, for whatever reason, Steam's survey was counting the Radeon RX 9070 XT as part of that entry until now, given how close the metrics line up.

All we can say for sure is that the Steam survey is an imprecise science. It's also not representative of the entire Steam community, as you have to be invited to participate and opt into the survey, otherwise your system's details are factored into the data.

Despite it's shortcomings, Valve's Steam survey is one of the best public resources to track gaming trends, considering the platform's massive scale. And the latest results indicate that the Radeon RX 9070 XT is more popular than previously suggested.