Desktop graphics
HC: Can you tell us more about how the slow decline in the desktop PC market is affecting the graphics industry?
JP: There are three users of "graphics" in the PC industry:
- Casual consumers who use graphics for office productivity, web surfing, and light photo work
- Professionals who use graphics everyday all day for CAD, content creation, video editing, and serious photo-editing.
- Hobbyists who play games and do ‘prosumer' video and photo work.
Each has different needs, budgets, production demands, and capabilities with regard to exploiting the graphics engines and tools. The causal consumer probably doesn't need an upgrade so he or she can defer any new purchases, and if he or she works for a company that decision has already been made for them.
The professional has little choice and has to have the best tools. They too are constrained by budgets and economic pressures and uncertainties and so their purchases as a category are down but not to zero - also they represent a small portion of the overall market maybe 3 to 5%
"The hobbyist is like the professional and will spend to the limit of his budget as often as possible"
The hobbyist is like the professional and will spend to the limit of his budget as often as possible, but with jobs disappearing that budget is under pressure. The hobbyist represent another 3 to 5%, some think as high as 10%.
HC: Have you seen a sharp decline in sales of top-end desktop graphics cards? Is there still any point to them?
JP: Obviously in a recession expensive items are the first to be cut. However, a recession doesn't change the need for such products to exist - they serve a viable and valuable function and have a defendable price-performance argument or they wouldn't exist.
If you want to squeeze the maximum performance and functionality out of a professional graphics application (like oil well visualization, or MRI voxel manipulation) you need a powerful, a very powerful graphics AIB. Likewise, if you want the maximum experience with a game, and in times of recession people tend to stay home more and play games, then you need an AIB that can extract the functionality built into modern DirectX 10/10.1 games.
