According to a new report published by the prestigious market research firm Jon Peddie Research, graphics sales have increased during the last fiscal quarter of this year. However, this is due to an increase in sales in integrated graphics, because the sales of dedicated graphics They have been plummeting for a few months now… and I’m sure you can imagine why.
There are many processors that incorporate an iGPU, an integrated graphics card that, although it generally doesn’t do much, is enough if you are not going to use the PC to play games. For their part, dedicated graphics cards are increasingly more advanced and powerful, and this has led to a notable increase in price in recent years.
Dedicated graphics are going down the drain
According to the aforementioned report, during the last quarter a total of 73.6 graphics cards were sold, including integrated and dedicated ones. This represents an increase of 3.4% compared to the previous quarter, but the most notable fact is that sales of laptops with integrated graphics have increased almost 6%. This has caused Intel to completely dominate the segment with a 65% market share, followed by NVIDIA with 18% and in third place, AMD with 17%. Of course, as we have already mentioned we are talking about total figures, adding iGPU and dedicated graphics.
But the most shocking thing comes when we limit the report to dedicated graphics, those that we all buy in stores for our gaming PC. Adding units of desktop and laptop PCs, we have only 7.1 million, a figure noticeably lower than in previous years. The research firm says that this may be one of the reasons why NVIDIA has recently fallen in the stock market, but also for the fact that, generally, OEM PC manufacturers tend to stock up on dedicated graphics during the third quarter of the year to be prepared for the Black Friday and Christmas campaigns… and this year it has not been like that.
Of course, then we have the market for dedicated graphics cards that are sold individually, which has also suffered a notable decline in sales. Because? Although JPR does not say it, for us the reason is more than evident: the price. And for a couple of years now, the graphics card has been the component that makes a PC intended for gaming the most expensive, to the point that at this moment the “normal” thing is that the graphics card literally accounts for 50% of the budget, and can reach even more extreme figures when you decide to go for a high-end graphics card.
Nowadays it is normal to build a PC configuration that costs around 800 euros and then have to spend another 800 or even more just on the graphics. NVIDIA has long justified the increase in the price of dedicated graphics cards by the fact that they require much more advanced technology, and that they provide much more than simple graphics processing units.
But we are talking about a gaming PC, to play, we do not need them to be capable of executing AI tasks in our home, that is what company servers are for. We want a graphics card that runs games, no more, no less, and we don’t want to pay extra for things we neither need nor want. No?
