Why Steam's 16GB VRAM Milestone Tells Only Part Of The GPU Story

Valve's latest audit of gaming PCs on Steam suggests that if you are not running a graphics card with 16GB of VRAM, then you are in the minority. For the first time, 16GB of VRAM tops the chart at 25.90% of systems that participated in the newest Steam hardware survey, which is just enough to slip past 8GB VRAM at 25.32%. Will game developers take notice?

Not likely, and not because they do not care. Instead, this probably reflects a quirk with how Steam audits systems that participate in its survey. We say this because older-generation and more affordable GPUs tend to dominate on Steam, not higher-end models with lots of VRAM.

For example, the top represented graphics card on Steam remains the GeForce RTX 3060 at 3.88%, a card that's now two generations old with 12GB of GDDR6 memory. After that is the GeForce RTX 4060 mobile GPU (for laptops) at 3.64%, and that part sports 8GB of GDDR6.

You have to go down eight spots to the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti (2.4%) for the highest-ranking graphics card with 16GB of VRAM, and that comes with a caveat too—the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti comes in both 8GB and 16GB variants, and Steam's rankings do not differentiate between the two.

If we had to guess, Steam's 25.90% figure is heavily weighted towards integrated graphics solutions that tap into unified memory, especially with the rise of PC gaming handhelds, and/or is misreading system RAM as VRAM in some cases. Graphics cards with 16GB of VRAM are typically expensive, especially in the current climate, so it's difficult to reconcile that fact with individual GPU rankings clearly identifying less expensive models as the most popular.

None of that is to say that 16GB of VRAM is being grossly misreported by Steam's latest survey, only that it almost definitely does not reflect the discrete GPU landscape.