The latest numbers from Peddmeister Massive reveal that graphics card sales have increased for the third consecutive quarter. The best news is this new Jon Peddie Research figure comparing the most recent quarter, Q4 2023, to the same period in 2022, which is up 32% year over year.

However, AMD's numbers remain grim: AMD's newest GPU family is also the worst performing in the last 20 years with respect to market share impact.

For AMD, the best interpretation that can be drawn from these numbers is that its market share increased from 12% in Q4 2022 to 19% in Q4 2023; Jon Peddie puts Intel's share in the most recent quarter at just 1%.

However, there is no getting around the fact that AMD's latest RX 7000 series is the worst GPU family by market share since JPR's data began over 20 years ago; the RX 7000 series has a lower market share than the RX 6000 series, and AMD's RX 5000 series and lower market share than AMD achieved with its limited GPU series culminating in the RX 5700 XT.

And perhaps the fact that the RX 5000 series did so well in market share helps explain the rumors that AMD does not care about the high-end market with its upcoming next-generation GPUs. as the JPR numbers show, the more limited kind of RX 5000 era graphics cards can achieve 30%+ market share, then one can see why AMD might take such an approach again. Having roughly the same market share, but with less capital expenditure on a more limited GPU product line, seems like a strong business case.

The excellent graphics in this 3DCenter show exactly the problems AMD has faced over the past 20 years or so. [Furthermore, one has to go back to 2005 to find the quarter in which AMD (then called ATI) outperformed Nvidia. Since then, the trend lines have all been one way, and the new RX 7000 does nothing to change that.

Interestingly, according to JPR's figures, the real damage was done in the GeForce 900 and Radeon R200 era, when AMD's market share fell from about 65-35 in Nvidia's favor to as low as 80-20, and AMD's share fell 86-10 in Q3 2022 which is a further gradual decline to an all-time low of

Returning to the broader market, JPR reports that GPU sales in Q4 were up 6% over Q3 to 9.5 million units, the third consecutive quarter of improved sales.

However, in terms of units sold, JPR's figures show that sales are still much lower than they were during that bizarre pandemic boom, with at least 10 million graphics cards sold each quarter, including Q2 2022 through Q2 2022, and a total of more than 10 million cards sold in Q4 2022, up from 10 million in Q3 2022, some quarters more than 12.5 million cards.

So the latest numbers are still far from the peak, and indeed a bit below the most recent pre-pandemic quarter.

Finally, JPR presents some interesting data on the overall situation: since 2000, more than 2.3 billion graphics cards worth $482 billion have been sold. That is a lot of pixel-pumping power.