Valve's September Steam Survey Crowns the RTX 5070 as Its Most-Used GPU
Steam's latest hardware survey shows the RTX 5070 topping the GPU charts, 32GB RAM overtaking 16GB, and 1440p displays posting their biggest monthly gain yet.
Valve's Steam Hardware & Software Survey for September 2026 is live, and for the first time since the Blackwell generation launched, a single RTX 50-series card has pulled clear of the pack. The GeForce RTX 5070 jumped 2.30 percentage points to 5.86% of surveyed systems, enough to make it the single most common graphics card on Steam this month, ahead of veterans like the RTX 3060 and GTX 1650 that have anchored the chart for years.
The monthly survey, which Valve runs as an opt-in system scan during Steam Client startup, is the closest thing PC gaming has to a real census of what hardware people actually run. September's numbers point to a platform mid-upgrade: new GPUs climbing fast, memory configurations jumping a full tier, and displays finally outgrowing 1080p.
Blackwell Takes the Top Spot
The RTX 5070 wasn't the only Blackwell card gaining ground. The RTX 5060 Ti rose 1.46 points to 3.87%, and the plain RTX 5060 added 1.22 points to reach 4.20%, meaning three of the four fastest-growing cards in the survey now carry a "50" model number. Older mainstream parts softened to make room: the RTX 4060 Laptop GPU slipped 0.28 points to 3.35%, and the RTX 3060 eased back 0.22 points to 3.54% even while staying in the top five overall.
- GeForce RTX 5070 — 5.86% (+2.30)
- GeForce RTX 5060 — 4.20% (+1.22)
- GeForce RTX 5060 Ti — 3.87% (+1.46)
- GeForce RTX 4060 — 3.72% (+0.30)
- GeForce RTX 3060 — 3.54% (-0.22)
AMD's strongest showing is further down the board. The Radeon RX 9060 XT held at 0.73% of systems, a reminder that Steam's GPU chart is still overwhelmingly green: NVIDIA parts occupy every slot in the top ten this month.
Memory Jumps a Whole Tier
The bigger story may be in system memory. 32GB configurations grew 4.77 points to 42.22%, officially overtaking 16GB (down 3.38 points to 37.82%) as the most common amount of RAM on Steam. That is one of the largest single-month swings the survey has recorded in either direction, and it lines up with the falling price of DDR5 kits and memory-hungry releases like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 pushing recommended specs higher.
Graphics memory is shifting more gradually. 16GB of VRAM edged up 0.29 points to 27.21%, narrowly ahead of 8GB cards at 26.71% (+0.97), while 4GB cards continued fading, down 0.56 points to 5.13%. The gap between the two leading VRAM tiers is now thin enough that 8GB could retake the top spot within a couple of months if budget cards keep selling at their current pace.
More Cores, Same Operating System Story
On the processor side, 8-core chips grew 2.02 points to 30.06%, pulling ahead of 6-core chips (27.23%, -0.20) as the most common configuration, while 4-core processors kept shrinking, down 1.67 points to 10.79%. Higher core counts are gaining too: 10-core chips rose 0.68 points to 8.19% and 14-core chips climbed 0.34 points to 5.23%.
Windows as a whole grew 1.08 points to 95.03% of surveyed machines, with Windows 11 64-bit up 0.37 points to 71.34% and, notably, Windows 10 64-bit also gaining, up 0.71 points to 23.61%. macOS slipped 0.22 points to 1.92% and Linux fell 0.85 points to 3.05%, both giving back some of the share they had picked up earlier in the year.
1440p Finally Breaks Through
Display resolution shows the clearest generational shift of the month. 1920x1080 dropped 2.61 points but still leads at 47.91%, while 2560x1440 jumped 5.18 points to 27.04%, its biggest single-month gain in the survey's recent history. 4K at 3840x2160 held roughly flat at 4.79%, suggesting most of the movement is coming from 1080p users stepping up one tier rather than jumping straight to 4K.
What the Numbers Actually Show
Valve is careful to note the survey samples a cross-section of Steam Client users who opt in, so it skews toward whichever regions and promotions were running that month — Simplified Chinese usage, for instance, surged 7.42 points to 31.39% this cycle, which nudges every other category slightly. Even with that caveat, the broad direction is hard to miss: a new generation of GPUs is displacing cards that led the chart for years, 32GB has become the baseline for a gaming PC, and 1440p is no longer a niche step above 1080p. For a storefront serving well over 100 million monthly active accounts, that shift in the average rig is as close to platform news as PC gaming gets.
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