Graphics card manufacturers predict fierce competition between Nvidia, AMD and Intel in 2021

For over a decade, the graphics card market has been dominated by AMD (formerly ATI) and Nvidia, which today share the entire pie. For a long time, it was a relatively even race between both parties, but in recent years, Nvidia has run away to take a dominant position.

Now the industry magazine Digitimes reports that competition is predicted to intensify within the next two years, according to several sources at the supplier level as a partner manufacturer of graphics cards. The report comes shortly after Nvidia’s latest quarterly report, which showed that the company’s sales of graphics cards for games have fallen more than expected.

Nvidia was one of the big winners mining-boom, when users who broke cryptocurrencies vacuumed the market for graphics cards and caused sales to skyrocket. Once the hysteria has subsided, it is also Nvidia that has lost the most in sales, with the result in hand more than both analysts and investors expected.

The reason is attributed both to geopolitical factors such as the trade war between China and the USA, but also to AMD, which with competitive pricing managed to squeeze market shares from Nvidia at the beginning of the year. The latter despite the fact that AMD’s volume sales were based on the three-year-old graphics card family Polaris.

On July 7, AMD also released the graphics family Navi with the new architecture Radeon DNA (RDNA) manufactured on TMSC’s 7-nanometer technology, where the latter is something the informants believe will give AMD an advantage also in the future. The company is also expected to release higher performing graphics chips with RDNA in early 2020.

► AMD Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT “Navi”

With the shift to 7 nanometers, AMD has begun what is expected to be a long-term collaboration with TSMC, whose 5- and 3-nanometer technologies will be used for future AMD products. This is also believed to be in favor of AMD, predictions which, however, probably presuppose that the company is able to take advantage of the more advanced technologies before Nvidia.

At the same time as AMD is working to become more competitive with Nvidia again, the processor giant Intel is entering the graphics card market in 2020. There is much to suggest that with their first generation of graphics cards in the Xe series, they have set their sights on the middle segment, while more performance-oriented products Coming later.

► Raja Koduri: “Intel’s first graphics card ends up in the middle class”

Although most of it is not yet known about Intel’s graphics card investment, it is already clear that the company has the support of partner manufacturers, where both computer builders for consumers and large clients in data centers and artificial intelligence (AI) will use Intel’s new graphics architecture.

All in all, it looks like the graphics card market will heat up in 2020, with the next year having three players fighting over consumers’ wallets.