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Valve's Steam Hardware Survey always makes for interesting reading, and the May 2026 edition has just been published. There's plenty to dig out of the data, but what caught my attention was the surge that AMD graphics cards have enjoyed over the past months, rising from 16.4 percent of the total at the beginning of 2025 to 19.1 percent as we close out spring 2026. For context, Nvidia still holds onto a 72 percent majority, with Intel bringing up the rear at eight percent.
The two most notable AMD current-gen GPUs, the RX 9070 XT and RX 9060 XT, also charted for the first time, at 1.33 percent and 0.72 percent of all respondents. Nvidia still holds the vast majority of the top spots - with the RTX 3060, 4060 Laptop, 4060, 3050 and 5070 all above three percent, in that order - but it's good to see a bit of movement regardless.
Elsewhere, AMD continues to make up ground on Intel in the CPU space, a trend that has been continuing since the release of Ryzen 3000 processors in 2019. It's now 46 percent to AMD and 54 percent to Intel, an eight percent point swing since the start of 2025 (when it was 38 percent to 62 percent). We'd therefore expect the two firms to draw even by around March 2027 - which would be an important market share milestone for the Red Team.
Similarly, eight-core CPUs (eg Ryzen 5800X3D, 7800X3D) are the fastest growing segment, with a 0.53 percent improvement versus April, with six-core (eg Ryzen 5600, 7600, 9600X) and 10-core CPUs (eg Intel 12600K, 13400F, 14400F) both losing around half a percentage point. Four-core and 16-core CPUs also saw marginal gains, with other core counts remaining static.
You can also see the effects of the current RAM pricing debacle, with 16GB systems gaining on 32GB ones, while the percentage of SSDs above 999GB has shrunk by 1.23 percent - with 256GB and 128GB (!!) drives making up most of the difference.
The OS results also make interesting reading, with Windows 11 rebounding against recent Linux gains by around half a percentage point - the scores now sit at 94 percent Windows, two percent macOS and four percent Linux. However, I'm pleased to see my own distro of choice, CachyOS, doubling to reach 0.5 percent, in second place behind SteamOS at 0.9 percent.
What do you make of the latest results? Let me know in the comments below.
[source store.steampowered.com]
Comments 4
Maybe DF will start testing on Radeon?
You can get a 9070XT for 650€, which is only slightly worse in RT (about 10-15%) than a 5070 Ti, which costs 1050€ these days. Add to that that Nvidia drivers have been pretty bad the past 10-12 months, and it is almost a no-brainer pick for a 1440p Desktop if you value your money.
It will be interesting to see how this market share develops over the coming surveys because there have been weird one-time outliers in the past which I assume come down to quirks of the samples Steam takes each month.
That said, it only makes sense that more people choose AMD's 9070 XT at a time when FSR4 has significantly decreased the upsampling gap while offering 5070 Ti performance at 2/3 of the price.
FSR4 is going to be important, but the real fight will come next generation, what does RDNA5/UDNA bring in terms of performance gains, price and how much of an overhead does FSR4 carry on those cards. FSR4 is good, but it is frustrating that it is not as universally included by developers as DLSS is. That will likely change when the PS6 (and to a far lesser extent Helix) roll out and devs will be using it by default on the consoles.
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