Apart from price cuts, there hasn’t been much in the way of good news on the AMD processor front lately. As any enthusiast grappling with which card to buy will tell you, the Radeon maker is much more competitive in the graphics arena. Jon Peddie Research’s market share numbers concur, and they say AMD took market share from Nvidia last quarter. Radeons made up 40.3% of discrete graphics shipments, up from 37.8% last quarter. Meanwhile, GeForce cards saw their market share drop from 61.9% to 59.3%.
You’ll notice the numbers don’t add up to 100% exactly. S3 and Matrox are still shipping graphics cards, though even combined, they make up just 0.4% of the market.
The real action is between the big dogs. JPR credits the early introduction of the Radeon HD 7000 series, coupled with Nvidia’s initial Kepler supply issues, for the shift in market share between the two. If you look at the numbers from last year, the relative positions are similar. In the second quarter of 2011, AMD had 41.2% of the pie, while Nvidia’s market share was 58.4%.
As a whole, the graphics card market declined 7% from this quarter last year. JPR won’t weigh in on whether that trend will continue, citing uncertainties associated with "world-wide economic conditions," but it does note that AMD’s A-series APUs are replacing budget add-in cards. Intel’s ever-improving HD Graphics implementations are likely lessening demand for low-end discrete cards, too. With desktop Trinity chips flexing faster integrated Radeons just around the corner, the trend would seem to be toward slow erosion from the bottom up. That’s not necessarily a bad thing for consumers, since it means the baseline quality of "free" integrated graphics is rising.
The JPR press release that hit our inbox isn’t online just yet. When the PR pops up, you should be able to find it here.