According to Jon Peddie Research, news relayed by Kitguru.net, the sales of desktop graphics cards hit a 10-year low last quarter. Jon Peddie points to the rise of tablets and integrated graphics as main reason for the decline and indicates that the sales of expensive graphics cards for gaming is rising.

The article includes two charts. The first chart indicates the declining attach rate of add-in graphics boards (AIBs) to desktop PCs. In Q2 2015, less than 10 million units of desktop discrete graphics cards shipped worldwide. This is an all-time low for the industry, coming down from 14 million just two years ago. In 2008, there were on average 20 million discrete graphics sold per quarter.

The second chart shows the market share of Nvidia and AMD. We all know that AMD has seen better days, but the decline is stronger than expected. In Q2 2015 Nvidia has a market share of 81.9%, leaving just 18% for AMD. In one year time, AMD's market share has dropped by 50%(!). According to JP Research, AMD’s quarter-to-quarter total desktop graphics cards unit shipments decreased 33.3 per cent whereas Nvidia’s quarter-to-quarter unit shipments decreased only 12 per cent.

Based on our internal research, we find that the GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 980 are the most used graphics cards by overclockers. In the top-10 of most used graphics card we find AMD only once, at tenth place, with the Radeon R9 290X. Especiall for Haswell-E based systems we find Nvidia doing particularly well as the most used cards are the GeForce GTX 980, GeForce GTX 970, and the GeForce GTX Titan X.