The discrete graphics card market continued its recovery in Q4 of last year, as shipments were up 6.8% compared to Q3 2023 and up a whopping 32% compared to Q4 2022, according to a report from Jon Peddie Research. While both Nvidia and AMD grew their sales quarter-to-quarter and year-over-year, AMD's growth was far higher, and its market share is now 19%. The CPU market is also seeing a recovery, with shipments returning to 2022 levels.
While discrete GPU sales saw increasingly high sales in 2020 and 2021 thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, shipments sharply declined in 2022 — likely due to a globally weakening economy that has seen some countries slip into recession. However, 2023 was a year of recovery for graphics cards sales, and Q4 continued this trend with a 6.8% gain in shipments.
Ultimately, these back-to-back quarterly increases in shipments have resulted in Q4 of 2023 seeing 32% more discrete GPUs shipped than in Q4 of 2022. Compared to Q1 of 2023, the difference is almost 40%. Jon Peddie Research didn't elaborate much in the highlights of its GPU market report, but rising desktop gaming GPU sales were a big part of the increased sales seen in Q3, and perhaps that continued into Q4.
CPU shipments are similarly seeing a rapid recovery, with Q4 outperforming three of 2022's quarters. The CPU market has seen better recovery than the discrete graphics card market, but it's still not quite enough to put it on par with 2020 and 2021, which saw some of the highest shipments on record.
Of the three major GPU vendors, Intel's shipments were mostly flat while Nvidia and AMD both saw quarterly and yearly growth. Nvidia's shipments went up 4.7% from Q3 and 22.3% from Q4 of 2022, but that's nothing compared to AMD's gains of 17% quarter-to-quarter and 117% year-over-year. AMD has certainly fueled a decent chunk of the GPU market's recovery in Q4 and 2023 as a whole.
Naturally, as AMD grew faster than Nvidia, its market share has increased to 19% — up from 17% in Q3. AMD's market share is also up 7% compared to Q4 of 2022, which was a very bad year for Radeon graphics cards. Jon Peddie Research estimates that AMD was only at 10% market share in Q3 of 2022, which is perhaps the lowest level AMD has been at since buying ATI and its Radeon graphics business in 2006. 17% is still relatively low, but it's certainly an improvement.
Jon Peddie, founder of the eponymous research firm, says GPU customers are "pretty damn happy and vote with their dollars," hence the increasing shipments. Though the market seems to be "entering a golden age," Peddie also says, "let’s not get ahead of ourselves and overreact as we did in the past with crypto and Covid."
