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Valve's Steam Hardware survey is no stranger to data anomalies. And yet it remains an undeniable source of interest and intrigue if you're into PC hardware. So, here's the latest twist. AMD's Radeon 9070 XT is subject to an implausibly big upgrade in terms of its user numbers in the latest survey for May, suggesting that there's been a change in the way the 9070 XT's data is collected or tagged.
In previous Steam Hardware Surveys, the 9070 XT has essentially been Sir Not Appearing in This Data. It simply didn't figure. But suddenly, here it is in the latest survey with 1.33% of Steam users, placing it 23rd among discrete GPUs.
Valve lists the top 100 entries, which currently reaches down to the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT on 0.17%. The point here is that it's highly implausible that the 9700 XT has gone from zero in previous months to suddenly representing 1.33% of Steam gamers. It's not like it's just gone on sale.
Now, you could write this off as another Steam data anomaly that's likely to vanish in future surveys, like the fairly frequent anomalies in the survey caused by Chinese Lunar New Year. However, there's another data point in the new survey that likely reveals what's actually going on.
The listing in the survey for generic "AMD Radeon(TM) Graphics" GPUs has dropped from 2.37% share in April to 0.90% in the new May data. That's a drop of around 1.47% and suspiciously close to the 1.33% the 9070 XT picked up over the same period.
Odds are, then, that either Valve has made changes to the way it collects data to better identify AMD GPUs. Or AMD has tweaked its driver software to the same ultimate effect. In other words, 9070 XTs that were being lumped into that generic Radeon category are now being counted properly.
The slight remaining gap between the loss of share of the generic Radeon class and the 9070 XT's gains can be easily accounted for by several factors. There may be other GPUs that have also benefited from the data collection changes (though not the vanilla RX 9070, which was in the previous few surveys and has not leapt up the ranks this month).
At the same time, presumably not everyone with and AMD GPU has updated to the latest drivers. So, that could play a part. Whatever, this new survey data seems much more likely to be accurate.
For some time now, AMD's latest RDNA 4 GPUs including the RX 9070 XT have ranked highly in various sales charts, most obviously on Amazon where a Gigabyte 9070 XT currently ranks as the most popular, which is about as mainstream as it gets. So, the idea that RDNA 4 and the 9070 XT in particular had gained so little traction with Steam gamers was hard to understand.
That's true even if you operate under the assumption that most graphics cards are sold as part of pre-built rigs. Anyway, suffice to say that the 9070 XT has now been installed in something more closely resembling its rightful place in the Steam Hardware Survey and we can all relax. Until the next anomaly gets our data antennae twitching.
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