A surprising new report shows Intel is now neck and neck with AMD when it comes to graphics card market share – a seemingly remarkable achievement considering Intel has only recently started producing discrete consumer GPUs.
I say “seemingly” as the report, which comes courtesy of PC market research company JPR, notes that both AMD and Intel are on 9% of the GPU market – while market leader Nvidia is way ahead of both at a huge 82% of the market.
While it’s certainly impressive that Intel has managed to catch up with the much more established (in the discrete GPU space) AMD, there’s no denying that it feels a bit like Intel and AMD are fighting over scraps, while Nvidia continues to dominate sales.
A monopoly is never good
Now, I’m a big fan of Nvidia, and like many PC gamers, Team Green is pretty much my default choice when I upgrade my rig, and it’s also fair to say that Nvidia has earned a lot of its success thanks to producing some of the best graphics cards money can buy.
However, it’s never great when a single company so thoroughly dominates a market. Market leaders with such a huge lead over their competitors can often be seen as complacent – after all, why innovate if you’re making huge amounts of cash anyway?
Many people argue that Nvidia is guilty of that, especially with its RTX 4000 series GPUs, which have so far concentrated on the high-end market, while neglecting gamers who are looking for more affordable graphics cards.
The company has also made some high-profile errors recently, such as the RTX 4080 12GB debacle – which saw Nvidia hastily ‘unlaunch’ one of the RTX 4080 models, only to later relaunch it as the RTX 4070 Ti after a public backlash. It could be argued that with Nvidia enjoying such a comfortable lead, it’s pushing its luck and making errors (and anti-consumer moves) it might not have done if that lead was more narrow.
But, with Intel and AMD languishing on just 9% each, it looks like there’s no chance Nvidia’s dominance is going to be seriously challenged any time soon.
Kudos to Intel
Despite this, we really shouldn’t take away from what Intel has managed here. The company, which is best known for its processors, launched its first Arc discrete gaming GPU in October 2022, so the fact that it is now level with AMD, which has been selling discrete GPUs for decades, is an impressive feat.
This is especially true considering that Intel’s launch of its Arc GPUs wasn’t the smoothest, thanks to rumors of delays and poor performance.
In reality, the Arc GPUs we’ve seen so far offer very good value for money, and rather than trying to compete with Nvidia’s powerful flagship GPUs like the RTX 4080 and 4090, they are battling it out with AMD to win over gamers with tighter budgets.
Splitting the budget market so successfully is bad news for AMD, and while I’m sure Nvidia will be keeping an eye on Intel’s growth, the fact that the company doesn’t seem to care about the budget market means its reign at the top will continue with relative ease. Whether or not that is good for consumers, though, is another story.
Via PC Gamer
