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PC components research outfit JPR has outed its latest market stats for the final quarter of 2024 and, lo and behold, AMD has clawed back 7% graphics market share from the Nvidia leviathan. However, JPR foresees trouble ahead in the form of, yup, you guessed it, ye olde tariffs.
Now, before anyone gets excited by the prospect of dancing on the grave of Nvidia’s gaming graphics market share, JPR’s numbers show AMD’s increasing from just 10% of the market in Q3 2024 to 17% in Q4. In other words, Nvidia remains utterly dominant.
As for Intel, it went from literally nothing to basically nothing, notching up 1.2% share in Q4. The new Intel Arc B580 only launched in mid-December, so it’s not totally clear if that card came soon enough to impact these figures, but it likely won’t have been by much.
JPR also noted that, “market demand for AIBs [add-in graphics cards] was greater than supply, which was constrained by TSMC’s production and stressed by the demand for AI compute GPUs.”
Consequently, the graphics market is still running at lower capacities than you might historically expect. “We’re still not back to normality, and the tariffs will drive down the overall market,” JPR said.
The research outfit also sounded a note of caution for later in the year. “Then in Q2, the tariffs will take effect, and while it is usually a down quarter, there could be an even more significant decline unless there is leftover backlog—this is one of the most challenging planning and forecasting periods ever,” JPR said.
Now, if you’re wondering why AMD gained market share, it’s not because of those exciting new RX 9070 and 9070 XT cards, which only went on sale yesterday. More likely the reason is that Nvidia had wound down production and sales of its RTX 40 GPUs but had also yet to introduce the RTX 50 family.
So, these figures are more about a temporary Nvidia dip than indicative of AMD turning things around. That could still happen if the RX 9070 cards do well. But that’s not shown in these quarterly results.
If you want to know how this all fits into the historical context, 3Dcenter.org has a handy chart showing AMD versus Nvidia market right back to late 2002 and including the latest numbers from JPR.
You have to go back to 2005 to find a quarter when AMD (then ATI) had more market share than Nvidia. More recently, AMD was as high as 35% in mid 2018. But it’s been a gradual slide since then, with Q3’s 10% share being pretty much an all-time low.
With all that in mind, it will be fascinating to see if those RX 9070 and 970 XT cards make any kind of dent in Nvidia’s market share. They certainly seem to have been received well, meanwhile, the supply of all of Nvidia’s RTX 50 GPUs seems to be so tight, it certainly looks like the perfect opportunity for AMD to keep on pinching market share.
Q1 2025 will also be interesting regarding Intel’s Battlemage GPU. Might that have made an impact? It seems unlikely given how hard Arc B580 and B570 cards have also been to buy. But we’ll find out soon enough.
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Kurt Indovina
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