If you're running a discrete graphics card for your desktop gaming PC (or any type of PC), there's a strong chance that it sports an NVIDIA GPU. That's just based on the latest shipment and market share figures shared by Jon Peddie Research (JPR), which show NVIDIA increasing its dominance in the add-in board (AIB) sector to claim a staggering 88% share of the market. The report comes on the heels of another one showing that
CPU shipments are soaring.
That's an increase from 80% from the previous quarter, and up from 84% from the same quarter a year ago. Put another way, if we round up slightly, NVIDIA now accounts for nine out of every 10 desktop graphics cards in the wild, leaving AMD and Intel to scrap for what's left.
It's not much of a fight for second place, though. AMD has gobbled up around 12% of the remaining share, leaving Intel with less than 1% of the desktop graphics card market (JPR lists Intel's share at 0%, which is obviously a rounded figure).
Source: JPR
The good news for Intel is that its share remained flat, whereas NVIDIA's gain came almost totally at the expense of AMD. On the flip side, the bad news for Intel is that its
Arc A770 and A750 haven't made much of a dent in the AIB market, despite ongoing
impressive gains in performance from continual GPU driver releases, some of which triple-digit percentage FPS gains in older titles.
This raises the question of whether competition for desktop GPUs is dead, and the answer is no. While AMD is in a distant second place, it still owns a modest chunk of the market. AMD's also planning to unveil its
RDNA 4 architecture at some point (which are rumored to feature reworked ray tracing), while Intel is working on Battlemage. Regarding the latter, Lunar Lake's integrated graphics is essentially based on Battlemage, as we highlighted in our
Lunar Lake deep dive.
Perhaps the more relevant question is how much market share can AMD (and Intel) capture with next-gen releases, and we obviously won't know for quite some time. It's rumored that AMD may focus strictly on mid-range performance with RDNA 4, though nothing is official. Even if it does, however, there's still a path to a bigger share of the AIB market.
That's because a relatively small fraction of gamers pay a premium for flagship GPU models. The latest
Steam hardware survey, for example, shows that the most-used GPU is the GeForce RTX 3060, a mid-range part from the previous generation, followed by the GeForce GTX 1650.
After that, the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti and GeForce RTX 2060 are close to each other. You have to scroll down 29 spots to see the GeForce RTX 4090, which has a 0.99% share among Steam gamers and trails behind integrated graphics from AMD and Intel.
Market share breakdown aside, JPR's auditing shows that 8.7 million desktop graphics cards shipped in the first quarter of 2024, which is down from 9.5 million in the previous quarter. That's a 7.9% sequential decline attributable to a "return to seasonality," albeit a big 39.2% jump from last year.
"We and the industry have been hoping for a return to seasonality, which was the hallmark of the PC industry for so many decades. It got disrupted with the 2007–2008 recession and had barely recovered when the crypto craze hit, then along came Covid, followed by the Ukraine war, and it looked like stability was just a faint memory," said Dr. Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research.
"In 2023, we saw four quarters of welcomed growth, and when Q1’24 was down a bit, no one panicked, as it looked like a return to seasonality—Q1 always used to be flat to down. Therefore, one would expect Q2’24, a traditional quarter, to also be down," Peddie added.
According to Peddie, every vendor is predicting growth in the current quarter due to demand for AI training systems in hyperscalers. Interestingly, Peddie also hints that this could impact the gaming segment, with demand for AI hardware eating into the overall supply of GPUs.
"So, for Q2, we expect to see a flat to low gaming AIB result and another increase in AI trainer GPU shipments. The new normality is no normality," Peddie said in his latest
shipment report.
Cross your fingers that we don't have another shortage situation where gaming GPU prices get jacked up.