Sharp Rise in Global GPU Shipments in Q3 '19
Jon Peddie Research
December 13, 2019

Sharp Rise in Global GPU Shipments in Q3 '19

The global GPU market has been strengthening towards the end of the year, which is in line with seasonal trends, but JPR also reports some surprising spikes in specific categories. Discrete GPU shipments increased 5.13% over last quarter and are now in 32.1% of PCs, which is a significant improvement and hopefully a bellwether for the industry.

Nvidia's shipments showed a giant 38.3% increase from last quarter. The company leads in discrete GPUs and this quarter shipped more than all of AMD's total GPUs (including APUs).

For comparison, AMD's overall unit shipments increased 8.7% quarter-to-quarter, Intel's total shipments increased 5.4% from last quarter, and as mentioned, Nvidia's increased 38.3%. Last quarter was transitional for Nvidia and the company ramped up at the end of the quarter. Channel inventory is now healthy says the company, Q4 notebook will be seasonally down. Nvidia says RTX doing well and represents 66% of its gaming revenue.

  • The attach rate of GPUs (includes integrated and discrete GPUs) to PCs for the quarter was 128% which was up 1.7% from last quarter.
  • Discrete GPUs were in 32.1% of PCs, which is up 5.13% from last quarter.
  • The overall PC market increased 9.21% quarter-to-quarter and increased 3.7% year-to-year.

Desktop graphics add-in boards (AIBs) that use discrete GPUs increased 42.2% from last quarter.

Even though there is uncertainty in the notebook supply chain due to CPU constraints, there has been a record number of new notebook announcements, and systems with amazing specifications in performance, battery life, and screen resolution. Specialized notebooks that sit somewhere between workstations and enthusiast PCs are arriving on the market for creative professionals. Strong graphics subsystems are an important selling point for these machines.

In seasonal cycles of the past, overall graphics shipments in the third quarter are typically up from the previous quarter. For Q32'19, it increased almost 11% from last quarter and was greater than the ten-year average.

A total of 89 million units were shipped in Q3'19 which decreased by 6 million units from the same quarter a year ago indicating the market is down on a year-to-year basis. However, this is the second quarter in a row of increased GPU shipments.

GPUs are traditionally a leading indicator of the market, since a GPU goes into every system before it is shipped, and most of the PC vendors are guiding optimistically for next quarter, an average of 7%.

The report contains the following content:

Worldwide GPU and PC Shipment Volume, 1994 to 2023.

Detailed worldwide GPU Shipment Volume, 1Q 2001 to date, and forecast to 2023.

Major suppliers: Detailed market share data on the shipments of AMD, Intel, Nvidia, and others.

Market forecasts: You will also be able to download a detailed spreadsheet and supporting charts that project the supplier's shipments over the period 2001 to 2023. Projections are split into platforms and GPU type.

GPUs: History, status, and analysis.

A vision of the future: Built upon a solid foundation of facts, data and sober analysis, this section pulls together all of the report's findings and paints a vivid picture of where the PC graphics market is headed. 

Charts, graphics, tables, and more: Included with this report is an Excel workbook. It contains the data we used to create the charts in this report. The workbook has the charts and supplemental information.

JPR also publishes a series of reports on the PC Gaming Hardware Market, which covers the total market including system and accessories, and looks at 31 countries.