Over the past few months, competition on the graphics cards market has become stronger, yet both ATI, graphics product group of Advanced Micro Devices, and Nvidia Corp., the biggest players in the industry, have recorded lower than expected revenues in the second quarter of the year. Jon Peddie Research has recently published the figures for Q2, and they show that the market value of the desktop add-in graphics solutions and the volume of sales have been in a considerable decline during the quarter, while the ASPs (average selling prices) registered an almost unnoticeable increase.

 

The ASP for a desktop discrete graphics card reached $182 during Q2 2008, going up by 25 percent from the $145.6 registered during the first quarter of the year, but dropping by 33 percent from the $273.29 registered in Q2 2007. 19.8 million cards were shipped during the second quarter of 2008, marking a 18.9 percent decline from Q1, and a 6 percent decline compared with Q2 2007, the JPR market research firm informs.

 

In regard to revenue, the increasing ASP managed to overcome the loss in units, reaching a total of $3.6 billion, which is about the same as for the first quarter, but going down dramatically (by 37.4 percent) compared with the second quarter of last year. The market value of discrete graphics cards registered a low value in Q1 2008 as well, and was 46 percent lower than in Q4 2007.

 

The third quarter of 2008 should bring some interesting changes on the market, since both ATI/AMD and Nvidia are expected to release several new products for the performance-mainstream and high-end areas. The ATI Radeon HD 4800 and Nvidia GeForce GTX 200-/9800-series address these segments, and their cost starts from $199 and goes up to $549. While the volume sales cannot be predicted yet, the fierce competition in the high-end segment should make the ASP rise continually.