As reported by both Mercury Research and now by Jon Peddie Research, in a graphics add-in card market that dropped dramatically in Q2 2016 in terms of total units shipped, AMD has gained significant market share against NVIDIA.

GPU Supplier Market share this QTR Market share last QTR Market share last year AMD 29.9% 22.8% 18.0% NVIDIA 70.0% 77.2% 81.9% Total 100% 100% 100%

Source: Jon Peddie Research

Last year at this time, AMD was sitting at 18% market share in terms of units sold, an absolutely dismal result compared to NVIDIA's dominating 81.9%. Over the last couple of quarters we have seen AMD gain in this space, and keeping in mind that Q2 2016 does not include sales of AMD's new Polaris-based graphics cards like the Radeon RX 480, the jump to 29.9% is a big move for the company. As a result, NVIDIA falls back to 70% market share for the quarter, which is still a significant lead over the AMD.

Numbers like that shouldn't be taken lightly – for AMD to gain 7 points of market share in a single quarter indicates a substantial shift in the market. This includes all add-in cards: budget, mainstream, enthusiast and even workstation class products. One report I am received says that NVIDIA card sales specifically dropped off in Q2, though the exact reason why isn't known, and as a kind of defacto result, AMD gained sales share.

There are several other factors to watch with this data however. First, the quarterly drop in graphics card sales was -20% in Q2 when compared to Q1. That is well above the average seasonal Q1-Q2 drop, which JPR claims to be -9.7%. Much of this sell through decrease is likely due to consumers expecting releases of both NVIDIA Pascal GPUs and AMD Polaris GPUs, stalling sales as consumers delay their purchases.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 launched on May 17th and the GTX 1070 on May 29th. The company has made very bold claims about product sales of Pascal parts so I am honestly very surprised that the overall market would drop the way it did in Q2 and that NVIDIA would fall behind AMD as much as it has. Q3 2016 may be the defining time for both GPU vendors however as it will show the results of the work put into both new architectures and both new product lines. NVIDIA reported record profits recently so it will be interesting to see how that matches up to unit sales.