In brief: The latest Steam survey has been released, and Valve has really shaken things up. After admitting last month that VRAM on some graphics cards was not reported correctly, there's been a complete change in the GPU section: the RTX 5070 is suddenly the top card, and RTX xx60 and RTX xx70 GPUs now hold the top 11 spots.
Valve said last week that it fixed an issue where VRAM on some graphics cards was not reported correctly in the Steam survey.
While there is a dedicated VRAM section, it seems whatever Valve has changed affected most of the survey as a whole.
In February, the RTX 5070 jumped from fifth place with a previous 2.87% share to the top of the chart with a nearly 10% user share, replacing the now second-place RTX 4060 in the process.
Now, the first non-RTX xx60 or xx70 card on the list is the RTX 3050 in 12th place.
Unsurprisingly, the RTX 5070 also saw the month's largest gains, increasing by 6.55%, while other cards made huge gains in February. For comparison, the best-performing GPU in January was the RTX 5060, which increased just 2.5%.
Another huge change is in the OS category. According to February's survey, the number of Windows 11 users fell 10% to 56% overall, while Windows 10 was up 12.4% to reach a 40% share.
This is a reversal of the previous trend of gamers, rather than regular users, embracing Windows 11. A recent report from Statcounter showed that 72.78% of Windows desktops were running the latest version, while Windows 10 was down to 26.27%.
Things were less turbulent in the CPU section. February was the second consecutive month in which AMD lost some CPU share as Intel made gains. It was only a minor decline, 0.39%, but two falls in a row has slowed Team Red's momentum in this category, and raised questions over whether it can close the roughly 14% gap on Intel this year.
Another major difference is in participants' system RAM. 16GB was the most popular amount last month with a 40% share, but after jumping a massive 19%, 32GB is now the most popular – what memory crisis?
Simplified Chinese, meanwhile, shot up 30.7% to become the most popular language on the platform (54%) as English fell 14.7% to second place.
Ironically, VRAM, the section Valve said was incorrect, barely changed last month: 8GB is still the most common amount despite falling 0.2%.
We've seen drastically different Steam survey monthly results before, including in March 2025 and October 2023 – things usually return to normal a month later.
Huge month-to-month swings like these are usually sampling noise, not the PC market changing overnight. The survey is opt-in and only captures a subset of active users, so if the prompt reaches a different mix of regions or usage patterns (like more internet cafés one month, more home PCs the next), the percentages can jump.
Small changes in Valve's weighting, normalization, or device classification can amplify this, and short-term events like sales, new hardware, or a hit game pulling in a specific crowd can skew the snapshot further.