AMD overtakes NVIDIA in graphics market share, first time in 5 years

AMD has had a phenomenal past couple of years with it culminating better than anyone could've planned it to celebrate their 50th anniversary this year, with the company releasing their new 7nm CPUs and GPUs in the Zen 2 and Navi products.

The hype has become very real with AMD's new Radeon RX 5700 series graphics cards, which has propelled the company into the headlines once again. According to Jon Peddie Research's new Q2 2019 GPU market reports, AMD shipped more graphics cards than NVIDIA for the first time in five years.

JPR's numbers includes all types of graphics processors, so we're not looking at just discrete graphics cards as this includes CPUs with integrated graphics. AMD has a boat load of those as well, but the new Radeon RX 5700 and Radeon RX 5700 XT have been immensely popular, even in a world where its competitor clearly has the superior product in terms of performance, technology, and feature set.

The data shows that NVIDIA had a GPU market share of 17% last year, dropping to 16% this year -- AMD on the other hand had 14.8% last year, and now commands 17.2% this year. As I said, this is a surprise considering AMD doesn't dominate NVIDIA at the higher-end, even with its Radeon VII with a Vega 20 GPU on 7nm and 16GB of HBM2.

AMD has a huge stack of CPUs that actually pack a great GPU for gaming, not everyone needs to have real-time ray tracing at 4K for gaming. There are games like Overwatch, Apex Legends, CS:GO, League of Legends, Rocket League -- games with an audience of hundreds of millions, that would be gaming at 1080p 60FPS on an APU.

NVIDIA doesn't have any products outside of its graphics cards that it can use to bump up these numbers, and I don't see a Team Green CPU anytime soon so AMD's dominance should only continue at this rate.

But alternatively, if you want the pure best gaming experience there is absolutely no doubt that NVIDIA is the undeniable champion. No GPU from AMD can provide you with super-insane 4K 144Hz gaming, or 3440x1440 @ 200Hz (my review on the ASUS ROG Swift PG35VQ here), or a BFGD that provides 4K 120-144Hz on a huge 65-inch TV.

No other GPU apart from NVIDIA's stack can give you real-time ray tracing... games like Control look absolutely insane with everything dialed up. This is something AMD cannot give you, right now. Next year? That's another conversation altogether.