The first Nvidia RTX 50-series GPU makes an appearance in the Steam hardware survey and it’s the RTX 5080 that has the honour

Yes, yes, Valve’s Steam hardware surveys can be problematic and occasionally throw up anomalies that can’t possibly reflect the reality of gamer’s rigs (there’s one such potential glitch to follow, so hang in there). I’m way ahead of you. But for the record, the first Nvidia RTX 50 GPU to break cover in the survey is the RTX 5080, which kinda makes sense.

It was, of course, the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 boards that were the first to launch of the RTX 50-series, allowing them time to amass numbers for this March instalment of the Steam survey. Not only would you expect the cheaper RTX 5080, with its smaller GPU die, to be made and sold in bigger numbers. It’s also a bit more likely to be bought for gaming than the monstrous RTX 5090, which is the kind of mega-GPU that people snap up for all kinds of weird and wonderful workflows.

Anyway, the RTX 5080 enters the list of most popular GPUs among Steam users with 0.2% market share. Not exactly a huge chunk, but then the single most popular GPU only has about a 5% share. That’s still the RTX 3060, FYI, with the RTX 4060 in second place, just a few 10ths of a percentage point behind.

In case you’re interested in this kind of thing, the first ’70-class GPU on the list is the RTX 3070 in 8th place with 2.87% of Steam gamers, while the 4070 is in 11th spot with 2.49%.

As for AMD, a non-specific “Radeon Graphics” entry notches up 13th place and 2.17%, while the first AMD GPU called out by name is the RX 6600 with 0.89% share.

AMD remains utterly swamped by Nvidia in the list, of course. The new Radeon RX 9070 boards don’t appear yet, which is to be expected. But even the RX 7800 XT doesn’t make the cut, though the RX 7700 XT is in there at 0.22%, just a few spots ahead of the RTX 5080.

Other notable stats include AMD CPUs gaining 6.55% share, while Intel lost 6.59%. As for the aforementioned anomaly, well, the proportion of users with the Chinese version of Windows installed literally fell by half, from around 50% share last month to 25% for March.

Superficially, that seems hugely improbable. Very large installed bases don’t change that fast. However, some observers point out that it’s actually the February data that’s anomalous, showing a huge spike in Chinese language Windows installs, with March a return to the norm.

However, even that February data may not be a weird as it seems. It coincided with Chinese new year, a period where many Chinese citizens have time off work which can lead to a sharp season spike in activities like online gaming.

Whatever, we’ll be keeping our scanners peeled in the coming months for mention of the AMD Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT GPUs. AMD reckons they are the fastest selling Radeons ever, so surely they’ll pop up in the survey, soon right…?