The RTX 3060 Era Is Over: GeForce RTX 5070 Suddenly Becomes Steam’s Most Popular GPU
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03.10.2026 16:10
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3 min read
Steam’s September hardware survey has recorded an unusual changing of the guard. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 has unexpectedly shot to first place among all GPUs on the platform. For years, budget-segment models like the legendary GTX 1060 or RTX 3060 held the top of the chart, but the initiative has now passed to a more expensive and more powerful class of accelerators.
In the latest Steam Hardware Survey report, the RTX 5070’s share reached 6.15%, posting strong growth of 2.38 percentage points over August. NVIDIA’s current 50-series has swept the entire podium: the base RTX 5060 holds second place (4.40%), while the RTX 5060 Ti rounds out the top three with a 4.06% share.
The previous favorites are losing ground, as expected. The crowd-pleasing RTX 3060, long the service’s top GPU, has shed part of its audience and slipped to fifth place (3.66%), also overtaken by the in-between RTX 4060.
Why the stats could have shifted so sharply
A single GPU’s share nearly doubling in one month is worth taking with a grain of salt. The Steam survey doesn’t force-scan the computers of every active player — the system collects data monthly from a random sample of users who have voluntarily agreed to send telemetry.
Sharp swings like this in Valve’s stats are often driven by activity in the Asian market — particularly Chinese internet cafes, where machine fleets are refreshed in large wholesale batches. To say with confidence that the RTX 5070 has become the world’s most widespread card, we need to see the trend hold in the charts for at least the rest of the fall.
The decline of Full HD and CPU parity
The surge in popularity of a card like the RTX 5070 correlates perfectly with another key stat in the report — monitor upgrades. The 1920 × 1080 (Full HD) resolution still holds first place with a 47.91% share, but it’s rapidly losing audience: down 2.61 percentage points in a month. Gamers are moving to the 2560 × 1440 (2K) standard, which is exactly what they buy 70-series cards for. In September, the share of 1440p monitors gained a hefty 5.18 percentage points to reach 27.04%.
Otherwise, the architecture of the average gaming PC remains stable. The vast majority of players are on 64-bit Windows 11. The CPU market is tightly contested, with a slight edge for the “blue” team: Intel chips account for 51.63%, while AMD solutions are installed in 48.37% of systems.
