AMD sent out a note yesterday with some interesting news about how the graphics card market fared in Q1 of 2016. First, let's get to the bad news: sales of new discrete graphics solutions, in both mobile and desktop, dropped by 10.2% quarter to quarter, a decrease that was slightly higher than expected. Though details weren't given in the announcement or data I have from Mercury Research, it seems likely that expectations of upcoming new GPUs from both NVIDIA and AMD contributed to the slowdown of sales on some level.

Despite the shrinking pie, AMD grabbed more of it in Q1 2016 than it had in Q4 of 2015, gaining on total market share by 3.2% for a total of 29.4%. That's a nice gain in a short few months but its still much lower than Radeon has been as recently as 2013. That 3.2% gain includes both notebook and desktop discrete GPUs, but let's break it down further.

Q1'16 Desktop Q1'16 Desktop Change Q1'16 Mobile Q1'16 Mobile Change AMD 22.7% +1.8% 38.7% +7.3% NVIDIA (assumed) ~77% -1.8% ~61% -7.3%

AMD's gain in the desktop graphics card market was 1.8%, up to 22.7% of the market, while the notebook discrete graphics share jumped an astounding 7.3% to 38.7% of the total market.

NVIDIA obviously still has a commanding lead in desktop add-in cards with more than 75% of the market, but Mercury Research believes that a renewed focus on driver development, virtual reality and the creation of the Radeon Technologies Group attributed to the increases in share for AMD.

Q3 of 2016 is where I think the future looks most interesting. Not only will NVIDIA's newly released GeForce GTX 1080 and upcoming GTX 1070 have time to settle in but the upcoming Polaris architecture based cards from AMD will have a chance to stretch their legs and attempt to continue pushing the needle in the upward direction.