Nvidia reigns supreme in discrete GPUs – but is that bad news for consumers?
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Nvidia has never held the GPU market tighter, looking at new numbers that represent the battle for a well-known analyst firm’s discrete graphics cards.
You may be familiar with Jon Peddie Research (JPR), and the company’s latest report on the GPU arena for Q3 2022 came out earlier this week and showed a massive drop in revenue, as we reported at the time. But now we have a fuller array of numbers showing the state of the discrete (standalone) GPU market and Nvidia’s supreme dominance in it.
WCftech (opens in new tab) highlighted JPR’s breakdown of discrete GPU share, showing that Nvidia has a mighty lead with 88% of the market in Q3, compared to just 8% for AMD. Intel has the remaining 4% share.
The overall picture is bleak, as you might expect, with discrete GPU sales dropping to just 14 million units in the third quarter – by comparison, 24 million graphics cards were shifted in the same quarter of 2021. So that’s a 42% year-over-year decline, a pretty frightening decline, especially when Q3 is normally a stronger quarter (with back-to-school sales and the holiday season approaching).
Analysis: Paying for Nvidia’s privilege
What’s seriously telling here is how the picture has changed from the previous quarter. Of course, in Q2 2022, Nvidia was still king of the GPU hill for a long time, but had an 80% share with AMD at 15% (and Intel at 5%). To see Nvidia have an 88% market share in the third quarter and AMD’s market share halved to 8% should be a serious concern for Team Red.
Yes, this is purely focused on discrete GPUs, so it doesn’t tell the full story (not counting laptop graphics cards or iGPUs), but as a snapshot of the desktop market, Nvidia should be very happy with this one.
In fact, we’ve never seen Nvidia have such a dominant share of JPR reports in recent memory. This is of course not a healthy state of affairs for the consumer.
Why not? Because Nvidia has such a strong hold on the market, it will bolster the company’s confidence that despite GPUs being sold at eye-watering prices these days, people are clearly still happy to pay for the privilege of owning a Team Green product .
And that’s part of the reason Nvidia no doubt thinks it can continue to charge a seriously hefty premium for its high-end graphics cards when it comes to the new Lovelace GPUs hitting shelves recently. A particular example is the RTX 4080, which, while not the flagship Lovelace product, comes at a price point that would make you think otherwise (particularly the more premium custom boards from third-party card makers, which are truly exorbitant). in terms of their price/quality ratio).
So, what about the numbers we could see for Q4, when sales of those Lovelace graphics cards come into play? (Remember, these weren’t available in Q3, so don’t show up in current stats). From what we’ve heard about the grapevine, Nvidia has shifted quite a few high-end cards, and of course AMD hasn’t released its rival RDNA 3 GPUs yet (they won’t be out until mid-December, so will have a more limited impact on the numbers from the fourth quarter).
Which begs the thought: could Nvidia actually reach a 90% dominance level for Q4? It seems very possible, and possibly very troubling, that this could encourage Team Green to think everything is fine with its desktop GPU prices, and continue with MSRPs for the Lovelace range clearly below be wallet-friendly.
As a final note, it’s also interesting to see that Intel’s discrete GPU share is now a relatively significant amount (and was in Q2, to be fair), given how early it is in the game for Arc graphics cards. Perhaps this is an angle where the price competitiveness of GPUs can be pushed further in the future, especially with Intel making strides in constantly refining its drivers – we can only hope that over time Team Blue will be a challenge on this front will form.