Desktop graphics Card Market On the Rise

Gaming hardware is good business, despite a declining PC market the shift towards PC gaming keeps on growing. In his latest report JPR shows that for the first time ever PC Gaming hardware passed a 30 billion threshold with an ongoing upwards trend in GPU sales.

“The graphics add-in board market has defied gravity for over a year now, showing gains while the overall PC market slips. The silly notion of integrated graphics “catching up” with discrete will hopefully be put to rest now,” said Dr. Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie research, the industry’s research and consulting firm for graphics and multimedia.

The graphics card channel in 2016 is showing a 21.2% growth compared to 2015, workstation graphics cards show a 19.2% increase. Q4 2015 compared towards Q3 2016 the entrire market grew 5.6% 
  

 
Jon Peddie Research (JPR) announced estimated PC graphics add-in-board (AIB) shipments and suppliers’ market share for Q4'16. Market share shifts. The market shares for the desktop discrete GPU suppliers shifted in the quarter too. 

AIBs using discrete GPUs are found in desktop PCs, workstations, servers, and other devices such as scientific instruments. They are sold directly to customers as aftermarket products, or are factory installed by OEMs. In all cases, AIBs represent the higher end of the graphics industry with their discrete chips and private, often large, high-speed memory, as compared to the integrated GPUs in CPUs that share slower system memory.

The PC add-in board (AIB) market now has just three chip (GPU) suppliers which also build and sell AIBs. The primary suppliers of GPUs are AMD and Nvidia. There are 48 AIB suppliers, the AIB OEM customers of the GPU suppliers, which they call “partners.”
Lots of AIB suppliers, smaller shipments. In addition to privately branded AIBs offered worldwide, about a dozen PC suppliers offer AIBs as part of a system, and/or as an option, and some that offer AIBs as separate aftermarket products. We have been tracking AIB shipments quarterly since 1987—the volume of those boards peaked in 1999, reaching 114 million units, in 2015, 44 million shipped.

The news for the quarter was encouraging and seasonally understandable, quarter-to-quarter, the AIB market increased 5.6% (compared to the desktop PC market, which increased 19.4%).