Jon Peddie Research has posted its latest Market Watch report on PC graphics. The Q4'18 report looks rather glum overall, with most metrics showing downturns but there are some glimmers of light here and there.
Looking at the bad news first, overall GPU shipments decreased by 2.65 per cent from last quarter, though normally Q4 sees an uptick in GPU shipments (with a 10 year average of 11.6 per cent up). Year-on-year the decrease was 3.3 per cent. If you break the quarterly shipments down by vendor, AMD and Nvidia were hit hardest (-6.8 per cent and -7.6 per cent respectively) but Intel didn't feel too much pain with a small 0.7 per cent decrease.
The good news in the latest JPR GPU market report was that PC sales saw an uptick of 1.61 per cent, which is a positive sign for the market overall. Desktop graphics might have suffered badly (-20 per cent) but laptop GPU shipments were up 8 per cent.
HEXUS readers are mostly interested in AIB shipments - the discrete graphics cards for desktop PCs that power AAA games at high resolutions and fast frame rates. JPR shared some enlightening info about this market segment. Most importantly for this market, JPR confirmed that "the channel was burdened with too much inventory [which] has impacted sales of discrete GPUs in Q4, and will likely be evident in Q1, and Q2'19 as well."
Other key AIB stats are that discrete GPUs were in 27.8 per cent of PCs, which is down 3.8 per cent from last quarter. Furthermore, shipments of desktop graphics add-in boards fell 10.8 per cent from last quarter.
