PC gamers have seemingly been rushing out to buy Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 and 5070 graphics cards in the New Year, with Valve’s latest Steam Survey showing a big boom in popularity. The budget-friendly RTX 5060 gaming GPU was still languishing in 21st place in the December 2025 survey, sitting behind the ageing GTX 1660 Super. However, the latest hardware survey from Valve puts the RTX 5060 at number eight.
These new figures give Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5060 a 2.5% share of Steam users, up from 2.21% a month ago. It’s not the only new Blackwell GPU to suddenly storm the top 10 either. Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5070 has also climbed from number 11 to fifth place in the space of a month, with a 2.87% share of the Steam gamer pie that finally knocks the GTX 1650 off its perch.
This means that, for the first time, all top five GPUs on the Steam Survey feature dedicated ray tracing and AI hardware. Several of the latest games, such as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, have made ray tracing hardware part of the system requirements, and it’s looking likely to become the new norm over the next few years.
This latest survey comes in a turbulent month for PC gaming hardware, thanks to a large-scale shortage of DRAM caused by ballooning demand from AI data centres. We’ve seen RAM prices rocketing, and GPU prices steadily climbing too. However, 8GB graphics cards such as the RTX 5060 are still generally available at prices close to their original MSRPs, and while RTX 5070 prices have also climbed, it’s the cost of 16GB cards that are really running away, particularly when it comes to 5070 Ti prices in the US.
However, bear in mind that we’ve occasionally seen anomalous spikes in GPU popularity in the Steam Hardware Survey, only for the numbers to revert back to their original ballpark figures a month later. The Steam Hardware Survey only captures data from users who submit their system information when asked, and there will always be many PC gamers who aren’t using Steam at this time, and indeed gamers who don’t use Steam at all.
It’s a useful tool for spotting general long-term trends, but month-to-month data can vary. We’ll have to wait and see whether these new figures hold up over the next few months, but at the moment, it does look as though RTX 5060 and 5070 are both proving incredibly popular, despite their comparative lack of VRAM.
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