Graphics card sales decreased by 20 percent in 2018

After years of relative silence in the graphics card market, Nvidia came out in 2018 with the fresh architecture Turing. First out were the Geforce RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti, which sold to the higher price segments. Later came the RTX 2060, which with a price tag of around 4,000 kroner became the cheapest in the series.

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However, with the lack of new graphics cards in the lucrative middle segment and the declining popularity of cryptocurrency mining, Nvidia reported declining sales. Competitor AMD, for its part, released the refreshed Radeon RX 590 in 2018, with marginal improvements over the RX 580.

In Jon Peddie Research’s latest report, it now appears that the two graphics giants have been hit on the sales front. From the third quarter of 2018 to the fourth, AMD’s sales of graphics cards decreased by 6.8 percent, while Nvidias decreased by 7.6 percent.

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Intel, on the other hand, which sells integrated graphics chips with its processors, went down only 0.6 percent. For the full year, sales of graphics cards fell by 3.3 percent, while the same figure for dedicated graphics circuits lands at as much as 20 percent. Laptop circuits, on the other hand, increased by 8 percent.

This is in line with a trend that has been going on for a long time in the computer market, where laptops often replace desktops. The integrated graphics circuits have also become so good that they are suitable for simpler games and for media consumption, whereupon dedicated graphics cards are mainly relevant for users with heavier graphics requirements.

To reverse the trend, Nvidia is now investing in Turing without Tensor cores and ray tracing at a lower price tag, where the GTX 1660 Ti for SEK 3,250 was first out. In March, the GTX 1660 is expected to land around SEK 2,700, while the competitor AMD will file on the Navi architecture this autumn. Rumors then claim that GTX 1080 performance can be obtained for just under SEK 3,000.

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According to Jon Peddie, retailers today have large stocks that remain from earlier in 2018 when demand was expected to be higher. Thus, the company predicts in its report that sales may be weak even during the first half of 2019. Whether sales can turn upwards with lightened stocks and new graphics cards remains to be seen.