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.
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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