Graphics card sales just got even worse-

Jon Peddie Research has just wheeled out its latest analysis of the graphic card market. And, boy, it ain’t pretty. Sales continue to fall. This time around, sales for the first quarter of 2023 are down 38% on the same period last year and 12% down on the last quarter of 2022.

Of course, these latest slumps come on top of the massive 50% year-on-year cratering of sales at the end of 2022 reported by JPR. Not good, is it?

Figures like these do come with a few caveats, however. By way of example, JPR erroneously included 60,000 Intel data centre GPUs into its figures last time around, only to have to rapidly adjust it figures. Errors can always be made, but the fact that its original figures suddenly put Intel on par with AMD with GPU sales should have rung alarm bells as being highly implausible. That it didn’t? Not terribly reassuring, is it?

Anyway, JPR still has Intel at a large fraction of AMD volumes while also showing AMD shrinking to a very small fraction of Nvidia’s sales. That doesn’t align all that well with anecdotal reports of certain price-cur AMD cards selling pretty well of late, while all reports of Nvidia GPUs sales are utterly doom laden. JPR currently has Nvidia selling nearly 10 times as many GPUs as AMD. If true, things may not be looking great for Nvidia, but the situation for AMD’s graphics cards is catastrophic.

Again, it’s worth remembering how these kinds of stats are arrived at. JPR’s figures are not peer-reviewed, industry audited facts. They’re estimates based on various techniques, including drawing information from contacts at some but not all players in the industry. Limited data points extrapolated out to market-wide estimates, in other words.

But there is still a story here and it’s that there was a big fall in GPU sales at the end of 2022 and the numbers are still going in the wrong direction, despite continuing new GPU launches.

These new numbers will not include the likes of Nvidia’s RTX 4060 Ti and the new AMD Radeon RX 7600, which launched after the relevant reporting period. Just about everybody in a position to comment on these things has been saying that the RTX 4060 Ti has bombed while the RX 7600 has sold OK. So, it will be interesting to see if that is reflected in JPR’s next round of sales figures.