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The latest market data from research outfit Jon Peddie shows that the volume of PC graphics cards shipped in the first quarter of this year actually held up pretty well, despite the broader chip crisis. But AMD is basically flat lining, stuck at well under 10% of the market, albeit with caveats attached to the quality of JPR's data.
According to JPR, 11.82 million PC graphics cards shipped in the first quarter of 2026. Note, that's shipped, not sold, there's an important difference which we'll come to in a moment. But that's only very slightly down on the 11.9 million units JPR estimates for the last quarter of 2025.
However, it's well up on the 9.2 million units the research outfit has inked in for Q1 2025. Year-on-year, then, things are looking pretty healthy for PC graphics. Or are they?
As 3D Center points out, "it's important to note that these figures represent shipments to graphics card manufacturers, not shipments to retailers or their sales figures. Therefore, this result could be partly due to graphics card manufacturers stockpiling in anticipation of the memory shortage (they wanted to quickly buy up supplies at a lower price)."
In other words, we'll have to see what the data looks like over the next few quarters to be sure. Meanwhile, what of AMD's ongoing struggle to make a dent in Nvidia's market domination?
Here, the news isn't great, though there's a pretty major caveat. JPR puts AMD at a mere 8% market share in these latest figures, or exactly the same as the previous quarter.
However, when JPR originally released its Q4 2025 figures, it had AMD down for just 5% of the market. For this latest release, AMD's Q4 numbers were revised, adding an extra 400,000 GPU shipments to its tally for the quarter and thus taking AMD to 8% and a total of one million units in the updated figures.
That's a pretty huge revision for AMD's numbers and does somewhat undermine the overall credibility of JPR's data. The company has form when it comes to data errors. Like the time when it wrongly included a load of Intel data centre chips as gaming GPUs and thus implausibly decided that Intel was matching AMD for GPU market share.
When JPR originally released its Q4 2025 data, there was some scepticism. Some observers pointed out that AMD earned $843 million in gaming revenue or 22% of Nvidia's reported $3.7 billion in gaming revenue in that quarter. Moreover, AMD graphics card don't extend across the whole market and it's extremely likely that the average selling price of an AMD GPU is much lower than that of an Nvidia GPU.
With all that in mind, the conclusion is that it is very hard to imagine AMD achieving 22% revenue share with just 5% unit sales of the PC graphics market. The confusing factor here is that AMD and Nvidia's "gaming" revenues also including console chip sales. And there, AMD has both Sony PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox, while Nvidia is essentially limited to Nintendo Switch sales.
Anywho, make of it all what you will. As it stands, it looks like the PC graphics card market is probably doing OK despite RAM and SSD prices getting silly. But we'll have to wait and see how things pan out later in the year before we can assume everything is going to keep on being dandy.
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