Graphics card sales for 2021 might shock you – but they're good news for AMD

techradar.com:

PC graphics card sales were up strongly last year according to a new piece of research, and the AIB or add-in board (meaning desktop graphics card) market grew to a value of $51.8 billion (around £40 billion, AU$68 billion) in 2021.

This comes from Graphic Speak(opens in new tab) (a publication of analyst firm Jon Peddie Research or JPR), and the report observes that in Q4 2021, shipments numbers of GPUs were up 29.5% compared to the same quarter in 2020, which is quite a boom (they were also up 3% on the previous quarter). In total, $13.5 billion (around £10 billion, AU$18 billion) worth of graphics cards were shipped in the final quarter of last year.

AMD actually gained more ground than Nvidia in Q4 2021, interestingly, with Team Red’s graphics card shipments up 35.7% year-on-year, whereas Nvidia didn’t make quite the same level of progress, albeit still managing very robust growth of 27.7%.

Team Green still remains by far the dominant player for discrete desktop GPUs, of course, holding 77.2% of the market.

Nvidia generally holds around an 80% desktop graphics card market share as per JPR’s regular figures, although in recent times it has reached as high as 83%. That said, we’ve seen it drop below 80%, too, but 77% is about the leanest market share figure we have witnessed in a while – and it’ll be interesting to see if AMD can further leverage any more sales momentum here.

Team Red does, of course, have a trio of refreshed RDNA 2 GPUs rumored to be close to arrival – along with fresh cheaper RX 6000 series models, too – and that could propel AMD further forwards, maybe even attacking to drive Nvidia below the 75% mark. A 25% share is as good as we’ve seen AMD do in recent times, going by JPR’s stats (that was back at the