Nvidia's RTX 5070 leaps to top of the Steam Hardware Survey but something looks fishy in the figures

Valve's Steam Hardware Survey isn't exactly an infallible source of real-world PC specification knowledge. Valve itself recently admitted as much. So, what to make of the latest survey for February 2026 that sees the Nvidia RTX 5070 leap dramatically to the top of the GPU popularity table?

For the record, the Hardware Survey had shown the RTX 5070 making gradual progress in popularity among Steam gamers in recent months. In October, it had 1.88% share of Steam gamers, rising to 2.23% in November, 2.41% for December, and then 2.87% in January. But suddenly in February—BOOM!— it's up at 9.42% and holding the number one spot as the most popular single GPU for Steam gamers.

Ultimately, the numbers don't look plausible. That kind of month-on-month change would require a huge number of Steam gamers to suddenly upgrade to RTX 5070s, pretty much overnight, for it to reflect what you might call an organic shift in GPU choice among regular gamers. So, something else is probably going on.

That something very likely has to do with China. The survey also reveals that the proportion of Steam users reporting Simplified Chinese as their client language leapt up by 30.74% to 54.60%. Immediately, the assumption involves the usual distortions thanks to the Chinese Lunar New Year, which took place on February 17 this year and includes a holiday period that ends, as it happens, today.

The idea here is that huge numbers of Chinese gamers get time off work and log in to play games on Steam, temporarily skewing the numbers. Typically, the figures revert to something like the norm in the following months.

This year, however, Steam reportedly added regional pricing for China. That coulda / shoulda meant prices adjusted for the local cost of living or purchasing power in China, making games more affordable for Chinese gamers. And that, too, could have resulted in a surge in the numbers logging in locally.

Net result? An unusually large number of Steam gamers in China in February, even for the Lunar New Year period. That certainly explains the big jump in Simplified Chinese as the client language pretty neatly. But what about the RTX 5070?

It's notable in the survey that a number of Nvidia GPUs have seen their Stewam share jump up pretty dramatically. The RTX 5060 is also up from 4.22% to 6.72% for February. Likewise, the RTX 4060, which was previously the most popular listed GPU in the survey, gained 3.10% to sit second at 7.46%.

Exactly what is going on isn't totally clear. But if the Steam survey typically contains a broad church of gamers, from casual to committed, perhaps the Chinese cohort logging on for the New Year period and perhaps to avail themselves of the new local pricing tilt, is more toward the latter. In which case, you might expect them to come relatively well equipped.

Even if that's correct, the RTX 5070 coming out on top is still an eyebrow tweaker, given it's a $500-plus GPU. It does somewhat beg questions around the notion of local pricing. If oodles of Chinese gamers can afford 5070s, that implies something about their purchasing power. Whatever, expect to see the survey results regress to something like the mean next month.