AMD’s comeback story over the last couple of years has been an inspirational one as we find them clawing back more and more share from both Intel and Nvidia in the CPU and GPU space. This is not a mere opinion as it is backed by Jon Peddie Research (JPR)’s special report “The Balance of Power in Gaming Report 2019“. The report studies the state of x86 gaming GPUs in 2018-19. So the research also includes PS4 and Xbox numbers as they are also powered by AMD hardware.
Do keep in mind, however, that this report was requested by AMD but JPR assures that the numbers and analysis in the report have not been influenced.
In 2019, AMD has a total of 480 million GPUs installed in gaming systems, including consoles. NVIDIA is slightly behind with 422 million. Intel has a paltry 49 million, no surprise considering that they don’t manufacture dedicated GPUs. The console market amounts for a third of the total gaming systems in the world. While this may seem insignificant, get this. In the past two years, consoles sales have grown by 50% from 200 to 300 million. On the other hand, the PC gaming industry has largely remained stagnant growing by just 100 million.
In 2019, AMD sold a whopping 36.5 million GPUs while NVIDIA shipped 21.5 million. Here, the Switch console powered by NVIDIA’s Tegra chip is also taken into consideration, in addition to the PS4 and Xbox One.
Looking at the annual shipments of gaming GPUs solely in the PC market, NVIDIA has a major lead here with an estimated 22.56 million units sold in 2019. AMD and Intel are tied with 13.7 million each. One noteworthy aspect of this survey is that the bulk of NVIDIA’s sales come from the PC market while AMD mostly relies on consoles for most of its revenue.
Overall, these numbers bode well for not only AMD themselves but also for the entire gaming GPU market as we see that the demand for gaming graphics cards has been steadily rising. 2019 also has had no mining boom which means these numbers almost accurately reflect the number of gamers. I say almost because there are still some niche users who are running SLI or crossfire setups.
We are on the verge of the launch of next-gen consoles which will also be powered by AMD hardware. The Radeon RX 5700 Navi desktop GPUs based on RDNA architecture seem to be doing well too. If AMD can keep this momentum up, we could see them reach a billion install base in the next few years.
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