Valve owns up to inaccurate Steam hardware survey findings, saying 'VRAM on some graphics cards was not reported correctly'

It's important not to lose sight of the diversity of hardware. Sure, we'd all love to be playing with the latest and greatest, but a typical price tag for, say, one of Nvidia's RTX 5090 GPUs makes that anything but realistic. A glance at the monthly Steam hardware survey demonstrates you can get on just fine with hardware that's a few years old.

However, if you're looking for anything deeper than a thousand-foot view of the state of hardware, Steam has offered one more reason to take its findings with a pinch of salt. For instance, the latest Steam Client Beta patch notes reveal a now fixed issue "where VRAM on some graphics cards was not reported correctly" to the survey.

Additionally, the way system information is reported for Steam's hardware survey has now been tweaked, so that "in the case of multiple display adapters, we now select the one with the most VRAM to display and report to Steam." That should be a fair representation for most rigs.

January 2026's Steam Hardware & Software survey says that 29.57% of systems report 8 GB of VRAM, but it's still unclear how much the reporting issue has affected this number.

As for system RAM—a particularly interesting data point given the still raging memory supply crisis—40.24% of participating PCs reported 16 GB. This is apparently a less than 1% drop from the end of last year—whether that represents deep-pocketed folks upgrading, or others selling off some of their RAM sticks is unclear. Either way, Nick's testing from earlier this month demonstrates that 16 GB of RAM is still plenty to play with.

Another interesting point to highlight is the teeny tiny 0.11% gain for Windows 11, which now possesses a 66.71% slice of the operating system pie. Windows 10 died something of a death in October, but a significant 27.79% chunk of machines are still holding on to the sunset operating system.

Given the share of the pie it held just a few months ago, that's not really the massive new year decrease one might've expected. While I'd advise against holding on to an old operating system—especially if you're not getting the free security updates only available to residents of the European Economic Area—holding on to older hardware for the foreseeable future is likely still the way to go.

Best PC build 2026

1. Best CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D

2. Best motherboard: MSI MAG X870 Tomahawk WiFi

3. Best RAM: G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB 32 GB DDR5-7200

4. Best SSD: WD_Black SN7100

5. Best graphics card: AMD Radeon RX 9070

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