NVIDIA says desktop GPU sales up 23%

Graphics chip vendor NVIDIA saw its share price rise overnight after a conference call yesterday evening in which it discussed its third quarter results with analysts. The company says it took in a massive $1.07billion in the three months to October 30th, beating analysts expectations by a small margin.

While a lot of the talk in the call was about the company's booming tablet processor business, where it's Tegra 2 and forthcoming Tegra 3 dominate Android manufacturers' designed, desktop hardware sales were above expectations. Notebook graphics sales were – surprisingly – down but the company says that thanks to Battlefield 3, Call of Duty: MW3 and Star Wars: The Old Republic (funny they didn't mention Skyrim...), there's been an increase in demand from gamers for upgrades over and above the seasonal norm.

Of course, it also helps that a lot of new PCs were sold to first time buyers in China and other emerging markets, but things are looking good for a company which many had thought would be threatened by the ubiquity of hybrid CPU/GPUs. Interim Chief Financial Officer Karen Burns made a point of the fact that growth in discrete card sales has more than compensated for loss of business in integrated chips.

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