Discrete Desktop GPU Market Trends Q3 2016: GPU Shipments Hit Two-Year High
by Anton Shilov on November 28, 2016 9:00 AM ESTWrap Up
The industry shipped 34.4 million discrete graphics cards in the first three-quarters of 2016, an increase of 5.35% from 32.65 in the same period last year. If everything goes as planned for AMD and NVIDIA, year-over-year unit sales of graphics adapters will increase in 2016 for the first time in nearly a decade. Obviously, shipments of desktop GPUs this year will barely touch sales of GPUs even in 2014, but it could be important that shipments of graphics adapters may have bottomed out.
With 9.34 million desktop AIBs sold so far in 2016, AMD has already beaten its last year desktop GPU shipments and is on a recovery path. Nonetheless, the company still cannot win back its market share from its arch-rival: its share has dropped to 29.1% in Q3 from 29.9% in the previous quarter.
NVIDIA’s desktop GPU sales so far (from Q1 to Q3 2016) are slightly behind shipments of its AIBs in the first three-quarters of 2015 because the company decided to aggressively clear out inventory in Q2. Nonetheless, with 25 million desktop GPUs sold this year (until September 30, 2016, to be correct), the company can still supply the same amount of desktop GPUs as last year.
As reported, iGPUs are slowly eating the lunch of entry-level and mainstream graphics cards that cost below $99. In Q3 of 2016, the industry shipped around five million of such AIBs, whereas shipments of gaming-grade desktop GPUs were around seven million. Meanwhile, the popularity of enthusiast-class graphics hardware decreased in Q3 2016 compared to Q3 2015 mostly due to classification, rather than due to changes in the general consumer behavior (what used to be enthusiast class performance can now be had at mainstream prices, in the classification scale based on price). Those who play games are going to continue to buy gaming-grade hardware and well-developed nations are going to increase purchases of more advanced GPUs because of factors like 4K/5K resolutions, VR and others.
“I think, one, the number of gamers in the world is growing,” said Jen-Hsun Huang. “Everybody that is effectively born in the last 10-15 years [is] likely to be a gamer.”
Important Notices
- Jon Peddie Research does not officially disclose actual unit sales of AMD, NVIDIA and Intel in its press releases. All unit sales published here are derived from market shares of appropriate vendors.
- Since in many cases JPR does not disclose quarterly TAM numbers, those numbers are derived from historical numbers published by the company.
- Some historical numbers were re-stated by IHVs and JPR reflected such updates in subsequent reports and releases. As such, some numbers in our graphs may differ from publicly available press releases.
- JPR did not release any data concerning sales of desktop discrete graphics cards in Q1 – Q3 2010, but only disclosed shipments for Q4 and total shipments for the year, which is why the numbers in the charts for Q1, Q2 and Q3 are the same.
- Given the fact that unit sales and TAM figures are approximate, we recommend to buy full reports from Jon Peddie Research if you need the data for decision-making.
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RussianSensation - Friday, December 2, 2016 - link
I5 2500K/2600K turn 7 years old next month, since they were released on January 2011!catavalon21 - Sunday, December 11, 2016 - link
How about splitting the difference, and call it 6 years old?Araa - Monday, November 28, 2016 - link
Never been an AMD fan myself but I hope they get out of the slumber they are currently in. I want the good ol' 2010 days back where they were a strong second.Keao - Monday, November 28, 2016 - link
Yeah and back then GPU mid-tier was a bargain :-)Aaaah I miss the days of the RADEON HD4870...
Stuka87 - Monday, November 28, 2016 - link
In 2010 AMD was in first place. Thats back when the 5000 series was king of the hill and the GTX 400 series was delayed 6 months and shipped as a power guzzling pig. It was later on when the updated 500 series brought nVidia back in front as the AMD 6000 series was just a basic re-badge.silverblue - Tuesday, November 29, 2016 - link
Not quite; the 6900 series moved from VLIW5 to VLIW4 due to AMD realising that the average slot utilisation was 3.4, hence there were efficiency gains to be made in reducing the size of each shader block. The 6870 and below were based off the 5000 series, however.just4U - Friday, December 2, 2016 - link
While the 470/80 were guzzlers for sure .. the 460 was the little darling... priced well and gave Nvidia fans something to cheer about. The 500 series certainly brought more to the table, however AMD was matching them in performance while beating them on pricing...I always remember wanting a 560Ti or a 570 but could never justify it on the price so opted for the AMD equivalent... sad to because even as it was about to be discontinued the damn cards never did come down in price. That's when I started to get a little miffed with Nvidia. After the TNT2 They really began to sock it to you price wise with the Geforce line... That's something ATi never really did... even when they were the king of graphics in the early 90s.
Strunf - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
ATI/AMD, nVIDIA will charge as much as they can... there are no good guys, they are quoted on the stock market and hence profit driven.In the early 90s the graphics card wasn't so important and there were a few players ATI, S3, Matrox, Intel... then the 3D accelerators kicked in and the market went crazy.
Samus - Tuesday, November 29, 2016 - link
I haven't had an AMD GPU since AMD bought ATI that I liked. They were cheaper, for the same performance as nVidia, but they failed early, the drivers were awful, and their partners were and still are lousy. AMD doesn't have an equivalent OEM builder to nVidia such as PNY or EVGA.And before you laugh about PNY, remember that PNY is actually the largest distributor of nVidia cards. By quite a lot. I remember reading a few years ago that PNY shipped more cards than every other nVidia partner COMBINED. All those Quadro's have helped their bottom line as well.
peterfares - Wednesday, November 30, 2016 - link
ASUS makes AMD cards. They're reputable.