Nvidia Takes Back Graphics Card Market Share from AMD

After a troublesome first quarter, Nvidia has, in the second quarter of this year, managed to take back some of the market share lost in favor of AMD thanks to a significant increase in the notebook GPU market.

According to the latest data provided by Market Watch, Nvidia has managed to secure in the second quarter of this year 54.6% percent of the total graphics card market, 3.8% more than what it managed to achieve in Q1 2011.

The rise is due mostly to strong sales in the notebook space, where Nvidia gained 8.9 points for a total of 50.6% market share.

The gains come at the expense of AMD, which slipped to 49.4 percent from the 58.3% it held in the first quarter of the year.

However, AMD did manage to score a small victory in the desktop graphics card market, where it has gained 0,2% from Nvidia for a total of 40.8 percent market share.

The battle between AMD and Nvidia comes at a time when analysts believe that the advent of compact notebooks designs, such as Intel's Ultrabook project, will significantly shrink demand for discrete GPUs in the notebook sector.

“We expect Intel Corp. and AMD to increasingly focus on notebooks with longer battery lives, lowering power consumption by about 50% over the next two years,” wrote Mark Lipacis, an analyst at Jefferies, in a note.

“We believe that lower notebook power limits would make it increasingly difficult for [manufacturers] to fit power-hungry discrete [graphics chips] in their notebook designs, representing a secular headwind for Nvidia and AMD’s notebook discrete [graphics chip],” concluded the analyst.

In the overall graphics market, which also includes integrated solutions, the winner is Intel, which commands 55.4 percent of the entire market. This is followed by AMD, with 24.1%, and Nvidia, with 19.9 percent. (via ComputerBase)