Video card sales again dropped compared to last year

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 03/04/2019 09:03 AM | source: jonpeddie.com | 43 comment(s)

That there have been some massive changes and shifts in GPU sales should not come as a surprise as the mining segment pretty much collapsed, and newer model graphics cards have become too expensive for the majority of people. The research was conducted by Jon Peddie Research. In their latest report, they show some interesting figures.

The numbers for the fourth quarter of 2018 overall show that the GPU sales fell by 2.65 percent compared to the previous quarter, AMD's sales where down 6.81 percent, Nvidia with 7.62 percent and Intel's 0.67 percent.

Compared to the previous quarter, Intel went with market share of both AMD and Nvidia, the latter two had a decrease of 0.6 and 0.82 percent respectively. On an annual basis, gpu sales fell by 3.3 percent, the video card market had a decrease of 20 percent.

According to JPR, the reason for this large decline lies in the large surplus of cards at the start of 2018, while demand fell sharply as a result of the collapse of the crypto market, which was also cited in the report for the third quarter. According to the company, this decline would continue in the first and second quarters of this year.

The PC GPU market decreased year-to-year by (3.3)%, sequentially GPU shipments decreased (2.6)%

Jon Peddie Research, the market research firm for the computer graphics industry, has released its quarterly Market Watch report on world-wide GPU shipments used in PCs for Q4'18. Overall GPU shipments decreased -2.65% from last quarter, AMD shipments decreased -6.8% Nvidia decreased -7.6% and Intel's shipments, decreased -0.7%.

AMD's market share from last quarter decreased -0.6%, Intel's increased 1.4%, and Nvidia's market share decreased -0.82%. Year-to-year total GPU shipments decreased -3.3%, desktop graphics decreased -20%, notebooks increased 8%. Although overall GPU shipments declined PC sales saw an uptick of 1.61% which is a positive sign for the market overall.

"The channel's demand for add-in boards (AIBs) in early 2018 was out of sync with what was happening in the market," said Dr. Jon Peddie, president and founder of Jon Peddie Research. "As a result the channel was burdened with too much inventory. That has impacted sales of discrete GPUs in Q4, and will likely be evident in Q1, and Q2'19 as well."

The fourth quarter is typically flat to up from the previous quarter in the seasonal cycles of the past. For Q4'18 it decreased -2.7% from last quarter and was below the ten-year average of an 11.59% increase.

Quick highlights

AMD's overall unit shipments decreased -6.81% quarter-to-quarter, Intel's total shipments decreased -0.67% from last quarter, and Nvidia's decreased -7.62%.
The attach rate of GPUs (including integrated and discrete GPUs) to PCs for the quarter was 135% which was down -5.92% from last quarter.
Discrete GPUs were in 27.78% of PCs, which is down -3.83% from last quarter.
The overall PC market increased by 1.61% quarter-to-quarter, and decreased -3.79% year-to-year.
Desktop graphics add-in boards (AIBs) that use discrete GPUs decreased -10.75% from last quarter.
Q4'18 saw a no change in tablet shipments from last quarter.

GPUs are traditionally a leading indicator of the market, since a GPU goes into every system before it is shipped, and most of the PC vendors are guiding cautiously for next quarter.

For those who wish to understand the PC market, an understanding of the highly complex technology and ecosystem that has been built around the GPU is essential to understanding the market's future directions.

GPUs are traditionally a leading indicator of the market, since a GPU goes into every system before it is shipped, and most of the PC vendors are guiding cautiously for next quarter.

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JamesSneed
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#5646235 Posted on: 03/04/2019 10:21 PM

Considering that the gpu sales do not reflect pc gaming market in the least I'd say yeah it is on the rise. Games sold is a better thing to look at.

Agree. We have had GPU stagnation for 3 years, excluding the extremely high priced RTX series, so the GPU sales are less connected to gaming than in years past.

KissSh0t
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Posts: 7163
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#5646240 Posted on: 03/04/2019 10:35 PM

I think if they brought the prices for video cards back down from the moon they might start selling again, with that said I think that retailers don't want to bring them back down because they liked the amount of money they made with the inflated price + selling to miners, now that miners aren't buying bulk anymore only the intended consumer is left and most of them aren't interested in the new inflated price brackets.

airbud7
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#5646243 Posted on: 03/04/2019 10:36 PM

I got a used 1060 off ebay for$110 ....great 1080p card
can't afford 4k stuff

Margalus
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#5646253 Posted on: 03/04/2019 11:16 PM

That doesn't surprise me. And it has nothing to do with the PC market "dying" as so many people like to say. The problem is with both cpu's and gpu's. 20 years ago you had to upgrade every year or two because things were advancing so rapidly, you had twice the power every year. The last 10 years have been stagnant. My old core 2 duo still does what the majority of people use computers for. My 7-8 year old i7-930 still runs even new games just fine with a 980Ti. There really has been no compelling reason to upgrade except for bragging rights or a few of the programs that use more cores on the cpu side. For the gpu side, it's basically the same. High res like 4k needs something more than a 980Ti, but then again it needs more than even the newest gpus can do, and not everybody is upgrading to 4k monitors yet. And if you are an average gamer that isn't very sensitive to framerates you don't even need anything that powerful. We really need to go back to speed of progress we had in the '90s so that we have to upgrade.

zig11727
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#5646259 Posted on: 03/04/2019 11:51 PM

Here in the US the RTX 2080 ti was released with a price of $1200 now due to import duties this high price has rose another $100 to $150 also new egg and others have started to charge local sales tax with adds another $115 to $130 depending where you live. I own a RTX 2080 ti and I have to say the card is not worth the price it should retailed for half.

Elder III
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#5646260 Posted on: 03/04/2019 11:54 PM

There are hundreds of thousands of GPUs being sold used that were mining over the last 2+ years. That right there will slow down the purchasing of new retail GPUs siginificantly.

Moonbogg
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#5646275 Posted on: 03/05/2019 12:26 AM

I like what you wrote here. I was getting into PC gaming during those golden years and I feel absurdly privileged to have experienced such an amazing era of technological development, especially something so closely related to personal entertainment like PC gaming hardware. We are among the fortunate few and we may be spoiled by that. Even if hardware advanced today like it used to, it still wouldn't have the noticeable impact on our daily use of the machine like it did back then. Basic use of the PC got faster with each new CPU in addition to games running faster as well. It improved the whole thing.
My dad got me a CPU upgrade from a 486 66mhz to a 133mhz version. It was the difference between Duke Nukem being a laggy mess VS being smooth and playable. No modern CPU is so slow that any game you play will be a laggy mess. It is always playable. If you have something higher performance such as an overclocked CPU, then forget it. Nothing will actualy lag on that chip for probably another decade. People these days see 60fps and they say, "That CPU sucks because it doesn't get a steady 144+". What the hell is this kind of talk? Voodoo graphics cards used to advertise "3D Gaming at 60 FPS!" right on the side of the box. Now people see 60FPS minimums and think the CPU or GPU sucks. The good old days are gone. For anything similar to the 1990's to happen again, we need a new technological paradigm to emerge from which rapid progress can yet again be anticipated and enjoyed.

0blivious
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#5646289 Posted on: 03/05/2019 01:20 AM

Indeed. Those days of rapidly advancing graphics and hardware 90s/00s seem like a distant past now. We get incremental increases, but nothing earth shattering now. Since about 2008/2009, we've seen diminishing returns across the board as far as advancements of tech and hardware. That's when the iPhone was getting popular, wasn't it? I'm going to posthumously blame Steve Jobs for this.

warlord
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#5646292 Posted on: 03/05/2019 01:37 AM

illrigger
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#5646595 Posted on: 03/05/2019 06:47 PM

The most worrying matter is that technology stopped advancing with large steps in this section. We have little gaps with immeasurable costs. As a result, consumers are paying more for less, year by year.

We need better material from a software prism and more efficient/effective programmers/developers.

PC hardware should be declining with those little improvements. Only nolifers or wealth morons are investing tons of money on a declining market.

Mobile phones are still only keep showing large fluctuations despite their 5 to 10 months life cycle. Technology ought to show evolution or starts dying.

That's not true. Consumers are paying the same for only slight performance improvements, outside of the 2080Ti. A 2080 costs the same as a 1080Ti and offers similar performance, same for the 2070/1080, and the 2060/1070Ti. The 1660Ti is actually a price drop when compared to the 1070 whose performance it matches. The difference lies in the fact that there is no $200 card yet, which traditionally is the sweet spot for most gamers. We can no doubt expect a cut down 1660 (with slightly above 1060 performance) to fill that gap shortly once part binning yields enough silicon to fill that role. The fact is, there's no difference in the market now than one year ago as far as price/performance goes.

The fact of the matter is, there's not a lot of market for high end video cards. Market saturation of the 4k gaming market where a 2080 or higher is needed is near zero, and the vast majority of gamers are playing at 1080p/60. For them, even a 1660Ti is overkill, and in the most popular games even a 1060 was delivering over 60fps consistently. Even Apex Legends (which is much more demanding than Fortnite) doesn't need more that a 1060/RX580 to get above 100fps at 1080. There's no significant market for higher end cards, so there's no incentive to drive prices down - basic supply and demand.

As for phones, you need to keep things in perspective. They are getting more powerful every year, but even this year's top-end iPad SOC (which is about 50% faster than any phones) is still competing with sub-$50 PC CPUs in terms of processing power - and that's with PC performance having basically stagnated in that space for a decade. Even with that, there's nothing that a phone or iPad that can do that needs anywhere near that much power - there's just no software that really takes advantage of it. The "large fluctuations" you talk about are little more that bragging rights that have little to no actual benefit to the platforms they support. In the end, what drives that market is hype, and that engine needs to keep running even if it doesn't actually mean anything.

D3M1G0D
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#5646662 Posted on: 03/05/2019 09:14 PM

As for phones, you need to keep things in perspective. They are getting more powerful every year, but even this year's top-end iPad SOC (which is about 50% faster than any phones) is still competing with sub-$50 PC CPUs in terms of processing power - and that's with PC performance having basically stagnated in that space for a decade. Even with that, there's nothing that a phone or iPad that can do that needs anywhere near that much power - there's just no software that really takes advantage of it. The "large fluctuations" you talk about are little more that bragging rights that have little to no actual benefit to the platforms they support. In the end, what drives that market is hype, and that engine needs to keep running even if it doesn't actually mean anything.

I dunno, I think it depends on the app. Playing Fallout Shelter on my Galaxy S8+ is very different from my 2400G (using the iGPU) - slow and sluggish on the former and fast and fluid on the latter. The game is basically the same on both (they can both load the exact same save file), and when I'm at home I prefer to play on my PC since it's so much faster. It's one of the reason why I disregard those Geekbench scores that show mobile SOCs rivaling desktop CPUs - from what I've seen, it's not even close.

I think it's been mentioned before, but we won't see major improvements in GPUs until at least 7 nm, and even then we may need to wait for it to mature a bit. GPU die sizes are already rather ridiculous (at least for Nvidia GPUs) and trying to cram more transistors on the current process is an uphill battle. We all complain about RTX pricing but I don't think it's necessarily greed that they're priced so high - Nvidia need to price them as such to maintain margins.

The same can be said about smartphones. Despite the absurd price tag on the latest iPhone (and the latest high-end Android phones), Apple's profit margins are actually less than they were before. Companies aren't necessarily increasing prices just because of greed, but because they need to compensate for rising costs.

With the difficulties of creating smaller nodes, I think we can expect a general slowdown in the years to come. One promising alternative approach is to use chiplets like AMD is doing with Zen 2, but that isn't a perfect solution either. In this respect, it's sad how technologies like SLI have fallen by the wayside (perhaps DX12 can resurrect multi GPUs, but devs need to get on-board).

angelgraves13
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#5646755 Posted on: 03/06/2019 03:16 AM

Well it had no effect on me as I did in fact buy an RTX card, and it was the 2080 Ti to boot. Overall, sales are down...everywhere.

pharma
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#5647307 Posted on: 03/07/2019 12:11 PM

Nvidia gains Market Share ....

The add-in board market decreased in Q4'18 from last quarter, and Nvidia gained market share. Over $2.8 billion dollars of AIBs shipped in the quarter.
Quarter-to-quarter graphics board shipments decreased by 10.7% and decreased by 40.2% year-to-year.

The market shares for the desktop discrete GPU suppliers shifted in the quarter too, Nvidia increased market share from last quarter, and Nvidia increased share from last year.

https://www.jonpeddie.com/press-releases/jon-peddie-research-releases-its-q4-2018-add-in-board-report

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