After years of absence, AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 XT has appeared in May’s Stream Hardware Survey, slotting behind Nvidia’s RTX 5080. Despite taking first place among AMD’s RDNA 4-based GPUs, the RX 9070 XT only manages to claim 25th place. Even so, that’s much better than before when it was nowhere to be seen.
Released back on March 6, 2025, the RX 9070 XT is AMD’s flagship GPU within its latest RDNA 4 architecture. Despite being more than a year old, the GPU has only just made it onto Steam’s Hardware Survey, which is based on data collected from a random set of users. The GPU hit the ground running with its first entry, claiming a 1.35% share, putting it ahead of any other named Radeon card, and slightly behind Nvidia’s RTX 5080 with its 1.52% share. The only AMD product that represents a larger percentage is the generic “AMD Radeon Graphics,” a name often used for integrated GPUs, which account for 1.89% of the measured market.
Keeping with discrete GPUs, the next in line for AMD is the RX 6600 at 32nd place with 0.90% share, followed by the RX 9060 XT in 39th place with 0.72% share – again, this is the latter’s first appearance on the survey, although it doesn’t differentiate between 8GB and 16GB variants of this card. As for the RX 9070 non-XT, we need to go all the way down to the 90th position to find it and its 0.18% share. For comparison, Nvidia’s most popular GPU is the five-year-old RTX 3060 with a 4.02% share, trailed closely by the RTX 4060 laptop at 3.99%.
Between its integrated and dedicated graphics, all architectures combined, AMD controls 19.13% of the surveyed market. In contrast, Nvidia controls a whopping 72.42%, followed by Intel with 8.05% – a big part of which comes from its Iris Xe iGPUs.
As for why it took this long for the RX 9070 XT and 9060 XT to show up in Steam’s data, there are two possibilities. First, it’s just a matter of change, as the samples for each month are picked at random, so perhaps none of them had this GPU. This seems unlikely, though, given the large share of users suddenly owning these GPUs, and their complete absence in previous surveys.
The second possibility is that Steam’s detection system was malfunctioning, which wouldn’t be surprising, as it has already had problems detecting VRAM capacity on some systems. It’s possible that on systems where both the iGPU and a discrete AMD GPU are enabled, the iGPU can be detected instead of the main dedicated GPU, which in some cases could be an RX 9070 XT. Indeed, the fact that the share for AMD Radeon Graphics has decreased from 2.42% to 1.89% in the space of a few days, suggests that the 9070 XT and 9060 XT account for some of this difference.
Regardless of the reason, we must also keep in mind that this survey isn’t an absolute representation of real-world market share. For instance, any machines that don’t have Steam installed aren’t included, as well as any users who opted out of the Steam Survey, or who weren’t logged in when Steam was looking for responses. It offers a quick way to identify shifts in gamers’ preferences over time, rather than accurate market share figures.
