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PC GPU market down sequentially and year-on-year

by Mark Tyson on 4 March 2019, 12:21

Tags: AMD (NYSE:AMD), NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA), Intel (NASDAQ:INTC)

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Jon Peddie Research has posted its latest Market Watch report on PC graphics. The Q4'18 report looks rather glum overall, with most metrics showing downturns but there are some glimmers of light here and there.

Looking at the bad news first, overall GPU shipments decreased by 2.65 per cent from last quarter, though normally Q4 sees an uptick in GPU shipments (with a 10 year average of 11.6 per cent up). Year-on-year the decrease was 3.3 per cent. If you break the quarterly shipments down by vendor, AMD and Nvidia were hit hardest (-6.8 per cent and -7.6 per cent respectively) but Intel didn't feel too much pain with a small 0.7 per cent decrease.

The good news in the latest JPR GPU market report was that PC sales saw an uptick of 1.61 per cent, which is a positive sign for the market overall. Desktop graphics might have suffered badly (-20 per cent) but laptop GPU shipments were up 8 per cent.

HEXUS readers are mostly interested in AIB shipments - the discrete graphics cards for desktop PCs that power AAA games at high resolutions and fast frame rates. JPR shared some enlightening info about this market segment. Most importantly for this market, JPR confirmed that "the channel was burdened with too much inventory [which] has impacted sales of discrete GPUs in Q4, and will likely be evident in Q1, and Q2'19 as well."

Other key AIB stats are that discrete GPUs were in 27.8 per cent of PCs, which is down 3.8 per cent from last quarter. Furthermore, shipments of desktop graphics add-in boards fell 10.8 per cent from last quarter.



HEXUS Forums :: 15 Comments

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Stop charging so stuffing much and watch me splash the cash. They're too expensive. Price out your customers and of course sales will fall. If you want to charge premium prices you have to accept you are marketing to a smaller demographic and cut your cloth accordingly.
Yep. I have a GTX970 and a 4K telly, so I currently game at 1080p and I'm only going to jump to 4K.
Make the cost of entry to 4K less than it was at 1080ti launch 2 years ago and you can have my money.
naturbo2000
Yep. I have a GTX970 and a 4K telly, so I currently game at 1080p and I'm only going to jump to 4K.
Make the cost of entry to 4K less than it was at 1080ti launch 2 years ago and you can have my money.

If you have a 4K tv, i doubt you're gaming at high FPS, so buy a cheap AMD GPU and join the 4K master race. I've been playing on 4K with RX480 and most games run at 60fps.
Well isn't this obvious? If you don't keep releasing new products which are demonstrably better than the old ones on a regular basis then people will not upgrade as frequently… Produce a next gen product every few months and people will upgrade. Produce a next gen product every few years and people won't upgrade because there is nothing to upgrade to. I am not going to buy a new card every year if it's the same lot of cards available, what sense would that make?!
philehidiot
Well isn't this obvious? If you don't keep releasing new products which are demonstrably better than the old ones on a regular basis then people will not upgrade as frequently… Produce a next gen product every few months and people will upgrade. Produce a next gen product every few years and people won't upgrade because there is nothing to upgrade to. I am not going to buy a new card every year if it's the same lot of cards available, what sense would that make?!

It isn't just this point (although valid), the bottom dropped out of the crypto currency market, hence a ton of inventory unsold and stuck in channel which likely was more expensive than usual so no heavy discounting. I doubt either AMD or Nvidia want to take the hit on that inventory by lowering prices and compensating channel for shifting it.

Also may be part of the reason behind the inflated pricing on newer cards.