The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 has rapidly become the most popular GPU on the Steam Hardware Survey, capturing 9.42% market share in February 2026 despite a global memory shortage and a price above its MSRP. This dramatic rise is largely attributed to a surge in surveyed users from China during the Chinese New Year holiday, with internet gaming cafes potentially skewing the data as many users log into the same high-end systems.
Other notable survey findings include a significant increase in systems with 32GB of RAM, even amid high memory prices, and a marked decline in Windows 11 usage among Steam gamers in favor of Windows 10.
The main topics covered are the RTX 5070's market performance, the influence of Chinese gaming cafes on survey data, and broader PC hardware and software trends on the Steam platform.
Nvidia’s RTX 5070 seemingly crushes memory shortages to reign supreme as Steam’s number one GPU — but there are questions about why
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Defying the ongoing global memory shortage, the GeForce RTX 5070 remains one of the best graphics cards. Despite a 15% price hike over its $549 MSRP, the upper-midrange Blackwell powerhouse has reportedly clinched the top spot on Steam as the most popular gaming graphics card.
That's what the latest Steam Hardware & Software Survey for February 2026 says, barring any reporting errors, and we know even Valve isn't immune to those.
The last few months have revealed a clear trend: the GeForce RTX 5070 has been gradually gaining ground on Steam's vast community of gamers. In February, Valve reported that the GeForce RTX 5070 made a dramatic leap to 9.42% market share. That's a staggering 6.55% month-over-month jump. While the number may seem modest at first sight, it's substantial in context since Steam boasts more than 36 million concurrent users. Even a single percentage point means hundreds of thousands of gamers.
Before the latest report, the GeForce RTX 4060 held the crown as Steam's most popular gaming graphics card. It's not rare to see a graphics card suddenly becoming more popular, but a seismic shift like that of the GeForce RTX 5070 is highly unlikely. The meteoric rise of the Blackwell-powered graphics card certainly raises many questions, and we think the answer lies in China. We've seen a similar case with AMD processors a few years ago.
Chinese Steam gamers accounted for more than half of the platform's population. The numbers show that 54.6% of users surveyed in February hailed from China, a gigantic 30.74% increase. The rise coincides with the Chinese New Year holidays, which last seven days. That suggests that millions of Chinese Steam users had more time to game.
If you look at Steam's chart of graphics card usage between September 2024 and February 2026, you'll notice a consistent bump around the Chinese New Year holidays, which vary between late January and early February.
However, the GeForce RTX 5070's growth to fame doesn't mean a nationwide shopping spree for the Blackwell graphics card.
On the contrary, Internet gaming cafes, which are very popular in China, played a major role in driving up Steam’s statistics. These bustling gaming cafes can dramatically skew Steam's survey results, since hundreds or even thousands of different users can log in to the same system. Now, multiply that by 10 or 20, which is the normal number of systems inside China's higher-end gaming cafes. Valve hasn't been transparent about how it surveys user systems, so we're unsure whether it has any mechanism to prevent duplicates.
While the GeForce RTX 5070 is the main talking point for February 2026's survey, there are other interesting takeaways, assuming they're not also influenced by the situation in China. For instance, Valve reported at 18.91% increase in gaming systems with 32GB. It's an interesting statistic considering we're in the middle of a memory shortage and memory prices have become ludicrous. Then again, many modern games are starting ask for 32GB as a minimum, so gamers may not have any choice but to upgrade the memory capacity inside their systems.
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Gamers' discontent with Windows 11 is also starting to show, despite recent reports that the operating system has nearly reached 75% market share. At least with Steam gamers, Windows 11 has declined by 10.43% in February 2026. On the other hand, Windows 10 grew by 12.46%, suggesting that gamers are flocking back to Microsoft's previous operating system despite the company ending support for it in October 2025.
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Zhiye Liu is a news editor, memory reviewer, and SSD tester at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.
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thestryker Yet another Steam survey dataset which is obviously inaccurate. This seems to be happening more often as it has grown which would indicate that their methodology is flawed. Of course the complete lack of transparency means we can all only hypothesize.Reply
It's a shame because it's the single largest source of available system data and should be a fairly consistent insight into what people are using. -
JayGau Gamers' discontent with Windows 11 is also starting to show, despite recent reports that the operating system has nearly reached 75% market share. At least with Steam gamers, Windows 11 has declined by 10.43% in February 2026. On the other hand, Windows 10 grew by 12.46%, suggesting that gamers are flocking back to Microsoft's previous operating system despite the company ending support for it in October 2025.Reply
I so don't get this one. The two systems are almost identical. The few minor differences can be easily tweaked to make 11 look almost the same as 10. You can restore the right-click context menu, rearrange the taskbar, uninstall Copilot and most of the other AI stuff, uninstall the news widgets, etc. But people still prefer to go back to a no-longer supported system? At that point, it's likely more something like "I heard it's bad from people on the internet so I think it's bad too".
Have you ever watched a video on YouTube that criticizes Win 11? You just need to watch one, and you instantly get flooded by "Windows 11 is the worst thing ever made" videos. -
vinay2070 I think at this point EPIC should come with thier own survey. Pretty sure they have captured enough people with thier free games. Most comments on youtube, every article on sales, even forums contents all indicate a lot of people buying AMD cards.Reply -
PEnns Very strange indeed.Reply
We went from Steam surveys a few months ago where cards almost 3-5 years old (1050, 1660, with 3060s being "the high end") being the vast majority in those surveys.
And now out of nowhere, all those are gone and replaced by 5070s which wasn't even on the horizon in the latest surveys??
And all this in a market where GPUs are out of stock, overpriced or both!! -
smogfactory Reply
I think this indicates how inaccurate the data from steam is. It is extremely unlikely for that scenario to be accurate for month on month, basically saying more 3m+ gamers suddenly downgraded their OS month to month. combine that with the ridiculous jump in 5070's I think they have a dodgy data collection process or corruption.JayGau said:Gamers' discontent with Windows 11 is also starting to show, despite recent reports that the operating system has nearly reached 75% market share. At least with Steam gamers, Windows 11 has declined by 10.43% in February 2026. On the other hand, Windows 10 grew by 12.46%, suggesting that gamers are flocking back to Microsoft's previous operating system despite the company ending support for it in October 2025.
I so don't get this one. The two systems are almost identical. The few minor differences can be easily tweaked to make 11 look almost the same as 10. You can restore the right-click context menu, rearrange the taskbar, uninstall Copilot and most of the other AI stuff, uninstall the news widgets, etc. But people still prefer to go back to a no-longer supported system? At that point, it's likely more something like "I heard it's bad from people on the internet so I think it's bad too".
Have you ever watched a video on YouTube that criticizes Win 11? You just need to watch one, and you instantly get flooded by "Windows 11 is the worst thing ever made" videos. -
nitrium Hey, I got one of those! So far it's been solid and a nice upgrade from my old RTX 2060 6GB. Expensive, but good.Reply -
russell_john ReplyJayGau said:Gamers' discontent with Windows 11 is also starting to show, despite recent reports that the operating system has nearly reached 75% market share. At least with Steam gamers, Windows 11 has declined by 10.43% in February 2026. On the other hand, Windows 10 grew by 12.46%, suggesting that gamers are flocking back to Microsoft's previous operating system despite the company ending support for it in October 2025.
I so don't get this one. The two systems are almost identical. The few minor differences can be easily tweaked to make 11 look almost the same as 10. You can restore the right-click context menu, rearrange the taskbar, uninstall Copilot and most of the other AI stuff, uninstall the news widgets, etc. But people still prefer to go back to a no-longer supported system? At that point, it's likely more something like "I heard it's bad from people on the internet so I think it's bad too".
Have you ever watched a video on YouTube that criticizes Win 11? You just need to watch one, and you instantly get flooded by "Windows 11 is the worst thing ever made" videos.
Windows 11 still has some of that AI Slop baked into the Kernel and many system DLLs and Windows 10 does not. From September 2024 (24H2 release) to March 2025 I spent a lot of time helping people with gaming problems on Win 11 that I just was not seeing on Win 10. Then just before 25H2 Microsoft updated the AI Slop in Win 11 and broke AC Shadows and other games so badly you couldn't even hit 60 FPS with a 4090 or 5090 and again I wasn't seeing that problem in Win 10. Something in the new AI Slop in Win 11 was affecting the Nvidia power profiles so GPUs were only using half power (in Watts) despite the GPUs reading 100% usage. After 2 months Nvidia finally fixed the Win 11 bug in their drivers. And that doesn't even count the other more general bugs seen in Win 11 like broken printer drivers, black screen issues on Nvidia GPUs and even breaking the Recovery Environment ..... None of those issues affected Win 10. I upgraded my MB, CPU and memory in August and installed Windows 10 and haven't had a single crash or issue since, something very few Win 11 users can say -
mhrde I would like to raise the point that the same effect you suspect behind the surge in RTX 5070 cards might be behind the surge in Windows 10 usage. I highly doubt a massive rollback to Windows 10. I think it's mostly about the suspected owners of those RTX 5070 systems avoiding fresh licensing fees until the last minute.Reply
Meridiano
