TECH NEWS – It took a strangely long time for this Blackwell-based graphics card to appear in Steam’s monthly hardware survey…
After a long wait, the entry-level GeForce RTX 5000 series graphics card has finally shown up in Steam’s hardware survey. Previous reports had already captured nearly every Nvidia GeForce RTX 5000 series GPU, but the RTX 5050 kept missing from the chart. Even though it launched in mid-2025, there had been no sign of the GeForce RTX 5050 in the database until now. Both the laptop and desktop versions are finally listed, although the laptop model actually appeared two months earlier.
The laptop version of the RTX 5050 is still more popular on Steam than the desktop card. Because most users prefer faster and better-value GPUs, such as the GeForce RTX 5060 and RTX 5060 Ti, the RTX 5050 has kept a very low market share. That has a lot to do with its awkward 249-dollar price point, especially since the much faster RTX 5060 had been selling for around 300 dollars, and sometimes even less, until the RAMpocalypse started hurting supply.
Right now, the RTX 5070 is the most popular RTX 5000 series GPU on Steam, sitting near a 3% share. The RTX 5050 is far behind the rest of the lineup with just a 0.17% share. Even so, it may soon catch up to some of AMD’s stronger mid-range cards, including the Radeon RX 9070, which appears to be the only RDNA 4 card currently visible in the Steam database. That GPU is sitting at just 0.18%, while neither the XT model nor the RX 9060 has shown up yet.
Cards with more VRAM are also becoming more popular by the day. It is increasingly obvious that, in 2026, players are leaning toward graphics cards with more memory, and it would not be surprising to see 16 GB cards gradually take over from 8 GB models. According to the latest Steam survey, 16 GB GPUs account for 23.51% of the market, while 8 GB cards are still the most common at 26.76%.
