NVIDIA GPU marketshare up 2% in Q1 2017 at expense of AMD

Jon Peddie Research published its quarterly discrete graphics card report. Unit sales of video cards took a big hit in Q1 2017 as they were down 29.8 percent versus the quarter before, which is a lot higher than the ten-year average of -2.6 percent. On a year-to-year basis, GPU sales fell 19.2 percent.

NVIDIA held its ground better than AMD and managed to increase its marketshare to 72.5 percent, up 2 percent versus Q4 2016. AMD on the other hand fell by the same percentage and held 27.5 percent of the market.

The news for the quarter was encouraging and seasonally understandable, quarter-to-quarter, the AIB market decreased 29.8% (compared to the desktop PC market, which decreased 22.9%).

AIB shipments during the quarter decreased from the last quarter 29.8%, which is which is below the ten-year average of -2.6%. On a year-to-year basis, we found that total AIB shipments during the quarter fell 19.2%, which is more than desktop PCs, which fell 7.3%.

Gaming the game changer. However, in spite of the overall PC churn, somewhat due to tablets and embedded graphics, the PC gaming momentum continues to build and is the bright spot in the AIB market.

The gaming PC (system) market is as vibrant as the stand alone AIB market. All OEMs are investing in Gaming space because demand for Gaming PCs is robust. Intel also validated this on their earnings call, and the recent announcement of a new Enthusiast CPU. However, it won’t show in the overall market numbers, because like gaming GPUs, the gaming PCs are dwarfed by the general-purpose machines.

Looking at the above chart, the seasonally cycle seems to be re-established, suggesting Q2 will be down. However, the swings are more dramatic now.

The attach rate of AIBs to desktop PCs has declined from a high of 63% in Q1 2008 to 42% this quarter, a decrease of 9.0% from last quarter which was negative. Compared to this quarter last year it decreased 12.9% which was negative. The overall GPU shipments (integrated and discrete) is greater than desktop PC shipments due double-attach—the adding of a second (or third) AIB to a system with integrated processor graphics—and to a lesser extent, dual AIBs in performance desktop machines using either AMD’s Crossfire or Nvidia’s SLI technology improved attach rate.