A new report from Jon Peddie Research presents some great news for the PC gaming market: GPU shipments from AIBs for the desktop rigs have increased by 37.4% in the last quarter. When you factor in all desktop PCs and not those custom-built for gaming or sold as-is, GPU shipments increased 16.8% in Q3 2023 compared to the last quarter.
All three big players in the GPU space benefited from recovery, and the report proudly proclaims that the post-COVID slump for PC gaming hardware "is over." However, AMD and the Radeon line-up look to have benefited the most as AMD's shipments increased by 36.6%, NVIDIA's by 25.2%, and Intel's by 10.4%.
This sees AMD's overall market share increase by 2.4% compared to the last quarter, with NVIDIA's growing by 1.3%. The report notes that iGPUs and APUs account for the shift, and part of that will undoubtedly be due to the rise in popularity of PC gaming handhelds like Steam Deck and ROG Ally.
What's remarkable about this is that even though PC CPU shipments are experiencing a year-to-year decline, GPUs will "have a compound annual growth rate of 4.18% during 2022-2026." And with that, the percentage of discrete GPUs in PCs will hit 30%, or an install base of around 5 billion.
There are some caveats, one of them being the fact that Q3 is always the strongest quarter. The second is that board partners have been redistributing and clearing out older stock to make way for the new. That said, this is great news for the GPU market - and a sign that the desktop graphics card sales are back on track.
"The GPU and PC market have had some violent roller-coaster rides over time: the crypto mining swing, the 2008 recession, the Covid shutdown," said Dr. Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research. "All of them brought the PC market down a notch, and always the market rebounded, but not quite as high as before. And every time, overenthusiastic forecasters tried to read into it their fantasies and desires. This bounceback is no different and is being overpraised when it largely reflects a cleaning out and straightening up of the distribution channel. All through the last three quarters, add-in boards sold, not at the normal volumes, albeit with complaints about prices, but sold, nonetheless."
