Nvidia takes lead in desktop graphics market

Tiburon (CA) - The global graphics market turned in disappointing shipment numbers in Q1, despite the launch of Windows Vista, which was generally considered to become a driver for graphics chips with more horsepower. Nvidia, however, continues to deliver and is now the leading graphics supplier in the desktop segment, according to Jon Peddie Research (JPR).

Some may have had doubts about Nvidia’s role as the only remaining pure graphics player in the market that is battling two giants - Intel on the one side and AMD (which acquired ATI last year) on the other. But over the course of the past three quarters, Nvidia has seen dramatic gains in certain market segments and the latest shipment estimates from JPR indicate that the company isn’t slowing down yet.

The market research firm said that Q1 2007 was "disappointing" in overall graphics shipments, with a sequential drop of 5.5% and a year-over-year gain of 5.3% to 78.8 million units. On the losing end was once again AMD, which lost 1.1 percentage points over Q4 2006 and now holds a market share of 21.9%. Nvidia held steady at 28.5% ; Intel gained 1.3 points and is estimated by JPR at about 38.7% market share.

On the surface, it appears that Nvidia hasn’t gained much, but JPR said that a strong growth in chipset shipments has allowed Nvidia to become the largest desktop graphics supplier in Q1, surpassing Intel. Intel’s dominance in the mobile chipset market as well as a year-over-year growth of the mobile graphics market of 24.6% allowed Intel to keep a clear overall lead in the global graphics market.

In the mobile discrete market, Nvidia continues to take over market shares from AMD (ATI). JPR said that Nvidia now controls 60.4% of this market, while AMD retreated to 39.7% in Q1 2007. However, to keep things in perspective, the mobile discrete segment is still rather small and accounted for only 5.2 million units or 21.8% of the total mobile market of 23.9 million devices that were shipped during Q1. The lion’s share of shipments are brought in by Intel.

Overall mobile graphics shipments accounted for 30.3% of all graphics shipments in Q1, JPR said.