Nvidia flies to 83%, AMD collapses: it is the market for video cards of the end of 2020

The market for dedicated video cards see one Nvidia increasingly in command. The latest data on the segment disseminated by Jon Peddie Research, which follow the general ones of the past few days, tell us that Nvidia has gone from the already high share of 69% in the fourth quarter of 2019 to83% in the same quarter of 2020, further consolidating the 77% it had already reached in the previous three months.

Consequently AMD, the only other force in the AIB market awaiting the entry of Intel, has seen its share shrink in 12 months from 31% to 17%. Analysts have not gone into the merits of these changes (at least not in the public press release, the report is paid), but it is not difficult to get an idea of ​​what happened.

From the last quarter of 2019 to date, Nvidia has churned out a large number of GPUs and more competitive than those of AMD in terms of overall value. After introducing the GeForce RTX 2000 series in late 2018, bringing technologies such as ray tracing and DLSS to the attention of gamers, Nvidia relaunched exactly one year later with the SUPER proposals.

AMD, in parallel, presented the RX 5000 series, starting from the 5700, without support for ray tracing. Nonetheless, Radeon’s sales rebounded for several reasons, bringing AMD’s share to 31%: the cards offered good performance up to 1440p at competitive prices, and ray traced games could be counted on the fingers of one hand.

From SUPER onwards, titles with support for ray tracing and DLSS began to become more and more numerous, capturing the attention of enthusiasts towards Nvidia’s GPUs, which among other things had no opponents in the higher end of the market. . In the latter part of 2020 we saw Nvidia relaunch with the RTX 3000 range and AMD respond shortly thereafter with the Radeon RX 6000 GPUs.

In the face of competitive performance compared to Nvidia’s proposals in traditional games, and of ray tracing results acceptable but not at the level of the competition, AMD’s GPUs have discounted the material absence of cards on the shelves and, perhaps, also the lack (l the company is working on it to ensure support for both PC and console) of a technology similar to DLSS.

This explains the strong contraction between Q3 and Q4 2020, with Nvidia which, although unable to cover the high demand, managed to see all the GPUs produced, in the face of a AMD which suffered the most from the global chip shortage, and has managed to bring fewer cards to market. Nvidia has also managed to expand its offering faster than AMD, unveiling models in less expensive price ranges.

As for the rest of the analyst report, we talk about an AIB market that moved 11 million units in the quarter and achieved a turnover in the year of 14.8 billion dollars. Q4 GPU deliveries contracted 3.9% quarter-on-quarter and 6.5% versus last year, a decidedly different trend from that seen in desktop CPUs, with Q4 deliveries up on Q3 by 27.9% and 5.2% on an annual basis.