Valve's Steam survey reclassifies AMD Radeon 9070 XT to 1.33% share

Valve's Steam Hardware Survey shows an abrupt change for AMD's Radeon 9070 XT, which appears in the May data with 1.33% of users and sits 23rd among discrete GPUs. The card had essentially been absent from previous surveys, making such a sudden rise hard to explain as a simple sales spike.

The survey reaches down to the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT at 0.17%, and the jump for the 9070 XT coincides with a fall in the generic "AMD Radeon(TM) Graphics" category from 2.37% in April to 0.90% in May. That 1.47% drop is suspiciously close to the 1.33% the 9070 XT picked up, suggesting a reclassification of GPU data rather than a sudden surge in installations.

Either Valve adjusted how it identifies AMD hardware in the survey or AMD changed its driver reporting so that cards previously lumped into the generic category are now counted properly. A small remaining difference can be explained by other GPUs benefiting from the change, the vanilla RX 9070 already appearing in earlier surveys, or simply not all users having updated drivers.

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