Steam shows RTX 50 growth, RX 9070 debut

Steam’s April 2026 hardware survey is one of those snapshots that matters more than it looks. It is not a sales chart. It is a rough picture of what people are actually using to play games right now. And this month the picture got clearer — Nvidia’s RTX 50-series kept climbing, AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 finally showed up, but the old king still has not moved. The GeForce RTX 3060 remains the single most common GPU in the survey. ### What actually showed up? The new names are the point. Valve’s April 2026 survey added the GeForce RTX 5050 and AMD’s RDNA 4-based Radeon RX 9070 to the main GPU table. KitGuru’s read of the survey puts the RTX 5050 at 0.16% and the RX 9070 at 0.17%, which is tiny, but that first appearance matters because it means these cards are now visible in enough real systems to register. ### How big is RTX 50 now? Pretty big, at least by Steam-survey standards. KitGuru totals the desktop RTX 50 stack at 10.8% of surveyed PCs. Add laptop variants and Blackwell reaches 13.41%. Inside that family, the RTX 5070 is the biggest desktop entry, followed by the RTX 5060, then the RTX 5060 Ti, RTX 5070 Ti, RTX 5080, and RTX 5090. That is fast adoption for a generation that is still new in the market. ### Which individual cards moved most? The month-over-month gains are easy to spot in Valve’s table. The RTX 5060 rose to 2.71%, up 0.29 points from March. The RTX 5060 Ti climbed to 1.90%, up 0.23 points. The RTX 5070 reached 3.01%, up 0.14 points, and the RTX 5070 Ti hit 1.70%, up 0.15 points. Even the RTX 5080 moved up to 1.44%. Basically, the growth is broad, not just one halo card dragging the line upward. ### So why is the RTX 3060 still on top? Because the installed base moves slower than the hype cycle. Valve’s April table still shows the RTX 3060 at 4.15%, ahead of the RTX 4060 at 4.05% and the RTX 4060 Laptop GPU at 3.98%. The 3060 was a mass-market sweet spot for years — good enough for 1080p and 1440p, widely available, and bought in huge numbers. Steam surveys measure that long tail. They reward volume, not novelty. ### What does the VRAM split tell us? It says the market is inching upward, not leaping. The 16 GB VRAM tier jumped by 1.98 points to 23.51%, while 8 GB stayed the most common at 26.76% even after dropping 0.76 points. That fits the broader picture — newer cards with larger memory pools are gaining ground, but the center of PC gaming still sits in mainstream hardware. ### Is this a perfect market-share chart? No — and that is the catch. Steam’s survey is optional, sampling can wobble, and weird one-month spikes do happen. You can even see signs of normalization after earlier odd swings in categories like Linux share and RAM splits. But as a direction-of-travel. ### Why should anyone care? Because this is the part that game developers, engine teams, and buyers watch. A GPU launch is one thing. A GPU family crossing into double-digit share on Steam is another. That tells you which features, memory targets, and performance assumptions are becoming normal on real gaming PCs — but it also reminds you that millions of players are still anchored to older midrange cards. ### Bottom line? The April 2026 survey says Nvidia’s Blackwell rollout is turning into real installed-base momentum, and AMD’s RX 9070 has finally entered the room. But the center of gravity has not fully moved yet. PC gaming still runs on a lot of yesterday’s hardware.