The discrete graphics card market showed signs of recovery in Q4 2022

Discrete desktop graphics shipments for the fourth quarter of 2022 are up 7.8% q/q but down 27.4% year-on-year, according to the research firm Jon Peddie Research.

Discrete graphics vendor market shares changed in the fourth quarter: AMD increased its market share sequentially, while NVIDIA increased it year-over-year. Intel only entered the discrete graphics market in the third quarter, so its market share will grow significantly this year.

Total video card shipments for the period were 7.3 million units, an increase of 7.8% compared to the third quarter when 6.81 million units were shipped. The quarterly momentum was higher than the average of the last ten years, which was 2.8%. But on a yearly basis, the number of graphics cards shipped fell by 27.4%. In monetary terms, graphics card shipments reached $4.1 billion in the fourth quarter, up $0.4 billion from the previous quarter.

For all of 2022, AMD, Intel, and Nvidia combined sold about 37.86 million desktop GPUs, compared to about 49.15 million units in 2021, according to Jon Peddie Research. In fact, this is an all-time low for desktop discrete graphics cards. For example, desktop graphics card sales peaked in 1998 at 116 million units.

Compared to the most recent quarter, AMD’s total desktop discrete graphics shipments increased 21.1% but declined 62.2% year over year. NVIDIA’s momentum is more even: quarterly growth of 4.0% and annual decline of 22% — the company still maintains a dominant position in the market with an 84.1% share.

Ultimately, NVIDIA maintained its lead with 13 million desktop graphics cards sold and an 84% market share. AMD’s share in Q4 2022 rose marginally to 11% from 10% in the previous quarter, but declined sharply compared to Q4 2021 as the company shipped just about 0.8 million discrete desktop graphics cards, one of its worst quarterly results of all times. According to Jon Peddie Research, Intel controlled about 5% of the market.

Analysts noted that the fourth quarter of 2022 was unique in its own way in the desktop discrete graphics market: stocks of previous generation graphics cards dwindled, but new generation graphics appeared, the stocks of which were quickly becoming obsolete. At the same time, the flagship NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 with a price tag of $1,599 showed successful sales, which means that consumers have become accustomed to higher prices.