Video card sales down 15.2 percent - ATI gaining marketshare

Jon Peddie Research says unit shipments of discrete graphics cards dropped 15.2 percent year-over-year to 21.92 million units while the ASP of a graphics card dropped from $257.08 in Q3 2007 to $178.36 last quarter. The add-in-board graphics market's value dropped 27 percent from Q3 2007, to $3.8 billion.

The report says a shift to cheaper PCs and the use of IGPs are to blame for the bad performance of the discrete graphics card market. This mainly affects low-end and mainstream graphics cards, as Jon Peddie says sales of performance graphics card were flat, while workstation cards was up 1.5x and enthusiast card sales up almost 3x. The firm also writes ATI (AMD) increased its marketshare from 35 percent to 40 percent in the discrete desktop GPU market.

In an earlier report the market research firm said that rapid expansion of notebooks and netbooks are to blame for the weakness of desktop graphics adapters overall. But even though the demand towards mainstream graphics cards declined in Q3 2008, more expensive offerings became more popular than in the same period last year.

“The loss in discrete sales was primarily in mainstream add-in boards (AIBs) due to overall market expanse driven by lower cost PCs and the use of integrated graphics processors (IGPs). In the Performance segment the shipments were about the same, Enthusiast was up almost 3x, and workstation was up 1.5x,” said Jon Peddie in an interview with X-bit labs in late October.

Considering the fact that shipments of premium-class graphics boards – from the enthusiast and professional segments – were on the rise and supplies of performance graphics cards stayed flat during the quarter, it seems that ASPs were significantly influenced by rapidly dropping prices on mainstream and entry-level components and not only the price-war in the higher-end segments