Intel Gains Graphics Market Share at the Expense of AMD, Nvidia

Discrete graphics shipments dipped 16 percent sequentially in Q4, according to data by Jon Peddie Research. Intel increased its share of the graphics market by 3.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012 to claim nearly a third of the market at 63.4 percent, the latest data by Jon Peddie Research (JPR) reveals. AMD, meanwhile, dropped from 21 percent in Q3 to 19.7 percent in Q4, and Nvidia gave up nearly 2 percent and remains in third place with a 16.9 percent share of the market. All three vendors saw graphics shipments decline last quarter. There were 28.8 million discrete GPU shipments in Q4, down nearly 16 percent over the previous quarter, and down 9.7 percent compared to a year ago. There was an 8.2 percent decline in overall graphics shipments in Q4 compared to Q3, news of which was "disappointing for every one of the major players," JPR said. Nvidia, which just launched its GeForce GTX Titan graphics card, saw quarter-to-quarter desktop discrete shipments fall 15.1 percent from last quarter, and the company's mobile discrete GPUs declined 18.4 percent. "The turmoil in the PC market has caused us to modify our forecast since the last report; it is less aggressive on both desktops and notebooks," JPR said. "The popularity of tablets and the persistent recession are the contributing factors that have altered the nature of the PC market. Nonetheless, the CAGR for PC graphics from 2012 to 2016 is 3.2 percent, and we expect the total shipments of graphics chips in 2016 to be