Discrete Desktop GPU Market Trends Q3 2016: GPU Shipments Hit Two-Year High

Wrap 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.

Related Reading:

• Discrete Desktop GPU Market Trends Q2 2016: AMD Grabs Market Share, But NVIDIA Remains on Top
• AMD Announces Q3 2016 Financial Results
• NVIDIA Announces Record Q3 FY 2017 Results