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Market analyst outfit Jon Peddie Research said woldwide sales of add-in graphics cards failed to perform as expected.;
With the previous 2009 quarter already presenting a low bar due to recessionary pressures, the news that the add in graphics market continued to fall was called a ‘disappointing result’ by Jon Peddie.
For the full year, 72.8 million add-in cards were sold, down from 75.3 million. While the volume was down, the total value of the market was up fractionally by 0.8 per cent to $17.2 billion.
As expected, JPR revealed that the low end value segment had been eroded by integrated graphics solutions, leading to the drop in overall volume. The continued shift towards notebook computers also contributed.
Yet despite the value segment erosion, average selling prices increased due to a boost in high-end graphics cards for GPU-computing for workstations and high-end models prominent in PC gaming.
The findings lend weight to a resurgence in PC gaming as claimed by the PC Gaming Alliance. The advocacy group recently released a report stating that the worldwide PC games software market was up 20 per cent in 2010 largely due to digital distribution.
Over the course of the year Radeon-maker AMD managed to pile on 12.6 per cent market share, climbing to 34.5 per cent of the market while Nvidia slipped 6.6 per cent to 64.8 per cent.
However the final quarter of 2010 saw Nvidia claw back some share, up 3.6 per cent over the previous quarter while AMD fell 5.2 per cent.
