PC gamers are rejecting the latest AMD Radeon GPUs, buying Nvidia cards instead

AMD might have garnered a load of positive press for its latest graphics cards, but PC gamers are roundly rejecting them, according to the data in the latest Steam Hardware Survey. In fact, not a single AMD Radeon RX 9070 GPU appears on the latest survey, nearly three months after their early March release, while even the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Ti has already made its first appearance.

It undoubtedly doesn’t help that the prices of the latest AMD GPUs bear little relation to the MSRPs originally quoted by the company when they were released. With its $599 MSRP, our AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT review was wholly positive for the huge performance on offer, making it the best GPU in its price sector. However, the actual price in the real world is considerably higher, with prices actually starting at $859.99 in the US, for example.

Gamers have seemingly voted with their wallets, as neither the 9070 XT nor the 9070 can be found anywhere on the latest Steam survey, while five Nvidia GeForce RTX 5000-series GPUs have already charted. Worryingly for AMD, the latter figures already contain the RTX 5070 and the RTX 5060 Ti. We noted after the April Steam survey that the new AMD GPUs had failed to chart, but wondered if we needed to wait a while for the data to catch up.

However, that’s clearly not the case – the RTX 5060 Ti is already on the latest survey, despite launching in mid-April, accounting for 0.21% of the Steam users surveyed, while statistically not enough Radeon RX 9070 GPUs are being used to chart on the survey. Meanwhile, the RTX 5070 has increased further in popularity, going up from 0.38% to 0.71%. While it’s still hard to buy high-end Nvidia GPUs at MSRP, Nvidia has largely managed to keep a lid on RTX 5060 Ti prices – you can buy a 16GB RTX 5060 Ti for $489.99, for example, which is 14% higher than the MSRP, rather than the 43% increase in price seen on the 9070 XT.

Clearly, some gamers are buying the new AMD GPUs, as we regularly see people sharing photos of them on social media, and huge amounts of stock sold out in the launch week, too. The problem is that, worldwide, the large-scale sales numbers are clearly nowhere near high enough to chart on the Steam survey for two months running.

There will be several factors at play here, from the huge strength of the GeForce brand and wide support for the Nvidia DLSS ecosystem, to AMD’s pricing mess, but it stands as a warning to AMD with the Radeon RX 9060 XT release date coming soon.

The Radeon RX 9060 XT price is supposed to start at $299 for 8GB cards and $349 for 16GB cards, which looks good on paper, but these cards are going to look increasingly unappealing if the real-world prices are higher than those of the equivalent Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Ti cards.

While you wait for our Radeon RX 9060 XT review, check out my Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Ti review to see why the 16GB version of this card is the best sub-$500 gaming GPU you can buy right now. Meanwhile, my GPU install guide will take you through the whole upgrade process.

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