Discrete GPU Sales Plummet to Historic Lows

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If you’ve been looking at the GPU market recently and thinking, “nope,” you’re not alone. Jon Peddie Research has released its year-end summary, and it paints a grim picture: Shipments of discrete GPUs have fallen to levels not seen in almost 20 years. It’s an unexpected situation given the recent deluge of GPUs in the channel thanks to the death of crypto. Plus AMD, Nvidia, and Intel have released all-new GPUs this year too. Despite the bounty of silicon at their disposal, gamers are just not buying GPUs right now.

Peddie’s full report is voluminous, coming in at 345 pages with 245 charts. It’s been summarized by the good folks at Tom’s Hardware and includes some interesting stats. Note that some of the numbers were calculated using other data Peddie has obtained. Overall, there were 6.9 million discrete GPUs shipped in Q3 of 2022. For the year-over-year period, 14 million GPUs were shipped, a 42% decline. That includes just GPUs from the big names: AMD, Intel, and Nvidia. The GPU market hit similar doldrums right before the pandemic, shipping just 7.4 million units. Still, the number for Q3 2022 is the lowest ever recorded by Jon Peddie Research.

As far as market share goes, over the last quarter Nvidia strengthened its market position. According to Peddie’s research, it now controls 86% of the discrete market. AMD actually lost market share in this period, and now only controls around 10%. Intel’s launch of its A700-series GPUs allowed it to capture 4% of the market. That’s pretty impressive since its GPUs have only been selling for a single quarter. Nvidia grew its market share despite the declining shipment numbers. For Q3, it shipped almost 6 million GPUs compared with AMD shipping less than a million. It’s unclear how many units Intel moved in this period. Still, it seems Intel’s launch for Arc was quite successful.

The reasons for the steep decline in GPU shipments aren’t perfectly detailed in the summary. However, we can make a few guesses. This entire year has seen a rapid slowdown in the PC market as the pandemic began to fade. People went outside again and turned off their PCs. There’s also been increasing economic anxiety for most of the year as well. This has been punctuated by mass layoffs at major companies recently, such as Meta and Amazon. Additionally, a lot of PC upgraders held off in the third quarter in anticipation of all the new hardware coming out.

Many people might have examined the new CPUs and GPUs and concluded prices were too high. This issue has affected both AMD on the CPU front and Nvidia on the GPU side. AMD had to dramatically lower Zen 4 prices for Black Friday and has largely kept them in place. Nvidia hasn’t lowered prices, but so many scalpers tried to return RTX 4080 cards that Newegg halted refunds for them.

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