In Q2 Nvidia’s GPU market share increased significantly.
Despite recent declines in sales, Nvidia has seen a significant increase in market share, maintaining its position as the industry’s leading discrete (standalone) GPU power. This is excellent news for Team Green. The RTX 3060 also seems to be selling a decent number of units at the moment.
Let’s start with those market share numbers from the analyst firm Jon Peddie Research (opens in new tab) (JPR), as discovered by Wccftech (opens in new tab).
According to data for the second quarter of this year, Nvidia had a market share of 79%, a sizable increase of 4% from the first quarter. AMD’s share declined from 24% to 20% within the same time frame. Team Blue is already making very modest gains into the desktop graphics card market while Intel holds the final 1% of the market with its new Arc discrete GPUs.
Nvidia’s current situation is essentially unchanged from the same quarter last year: AMD was on 20% a year ago and is still on 20% as indicated. Team Green had an 80% share in Q2 2021 and now has 79%, losing that one percentage point to Intel.
A GPU that appears to be gaining major sales momentum and aiding Nvidia’s case is the RTX 3060, as Eteknik (opens in new tab) pointed out when referencing the most recent August results of the Steam Hardware Survey (opens in new tab).
With a significant 0.66% growth in August and an overall market share of 3.24%, the RTX 3060 desktop graphics card is currently ranked sixth in the overall sales rankings for Steam players. It trails the 3060 laptop GPU by by 3.39%, which is in fifth position.
In fact, the RTX 3060 (both desktop and laptop) is more popular than the top-ranked GTX 1060, which is on 6.6% (after suffering a significant dip of 0.52% this month), when you mix those numbers together.
In fact, all of the top 10 GPUs, all of which are Nvidia models, saw a decline in popularity, with the exception of the RTX 3060 cards and the RTX 3070 in tenth place, which saw a slight increase of 0.03%.
Analyses: Some comfort for Nvidia in these trying times
As we already reported, Nvidia has recently seen a decline in GPU shipments, which has been exacerbated by weaker demand and the unfortunate circumstance that the company overproduced RTX 3000 stock.
The statistics from JPR demonstrate that everyone is struggling because shipments of discrete graphics cards as a whole are down 22% from the prior quarter. The fact that Nvidia reclaimed the lead in Q2 over Q1 is at least some consolation, and the RTX 3060’s rapid development is also encouraging.
Further price reductions for Nvidia GPUs are anticipated to take place very soon, as well as for AMD graphics cards, as Team Red also has to get rid of current-gen inventory before next-gen goods are released later this year. This is expected to fuel RTX 3000 sales even more.
The RTX 3090 and its Ti variant, as well as the RTX 3080 Ti in particular, have just recently experienced significant price reductions, but reductions are quite likely to spread farther down the line. We don’t know if they’ll get as far as the RTX 3060 yet, but we must keep in mind that the RTX 4060, which would be its replacement, isn’t in the near future (not yet). While the RTX 4070 and upwards are unquestionably, at least theoretically, even if the rumour mill speculates that there may be more apparent staggered launch, with larger gaps than usual between these higher-end next-gen models.
All of this points to the RTX 3060’s pricing not changing significantly, but even minor price reductions might boost sales of this mid-range GPU further on top of its already obvious upward trend over the previous month. Given that we are unsure of the exact release date of the 4060, this graphics card may continue to play a significant role for Nvidia even after the next-gen Lovelace launch has already begun. Additionally, even after the 4060 makes its appearance, the 3060 could continue to be available as a less expensive option (Team Green has previously discussed a launch window that will ‘layer’ the two GPU generations together).
