While we reported recently on the decline of overall GPU shipments, a new report out of John Peddie Research covers the add-in board segment to give us a look at the desktop graphics card market. So how are the big two (sorry Matrox) doing?

GPU Supplier Market Share This Quarter Market Share Last Quarter Market Share Last Year
AMD 18.0% 22.5% 37.9%
Matrox 0.00% 0.1% 0.1%
NVIDIA 81.9% 77.4% 62.0%

The big news is of course a drop in market share for AMD of 4.5% quarter-to-quarter, and down to just 18% from 37.9% last year. There will be many opinions as to why their share has been dropping in the last year, but it certainly didn't help that the 300-series GPUs are rebrands of 200-series, and the new Fury cards have had very limited availability so far.

The graph from Mercury Research illustrates what is almost a mirror image, with NVIDIA gaining 20% as AMD lost 20%, for a 40% swing in overall share. Ouch. Meanwhile (not pictured) Matrox didn't have a statistically meaningful quarter but still manage to appear on the JPR report with 0.1% market share (somehow) last quarter.

The desktop market isn't actually suffering quite as much as the overall PC market, and specifically the enthusiast market.

"The AIB market has benefited from the enthusiast segment PC growth, which has been partially fueled by recent introductions of exciting new powerful (GPUs). The demand for high-end PCs and associated hardware from the enthusiast and overclocking segments has bucked the downward trend and given AIB vendors a needed prospect to offset declining sales in the mainstream consumer space."

But not all is well considering overall the add-in board attach rate with desktops "has declined from a high of 63% in Q1 2008 to 37% this quarter". This is indicative of the overall trend toward integrated GPUs in the industry with AMD APUs and Intel processor graphics, as illustrated by this graphic from the report.

The year-to-year numbers show an overall drop of 18.8%, and even with their dominant 81.9% market share NVIDIA has still seen their shipments decrease by 12% this quarter. These trends seem to indicate a gloomy future for discrete graphics in the coming years, but for now we in the enthusiast community will continue to keep it afloat. It would certainly be nice to see some gains from AMD soon to keep things interesting, which might help lower prices down from their lofty $400 – $600 mark for flagship cards at the moment.