Highlights
- Nvidia now controls 94% of discrete GPU shipments. AMD fell to roughly 5%, losing two-thirds of its share in 2025.
- Q4 holiday shipments dropped 4.4% sequentially as DRAM costs and tariff fears pushed buyers away from discrete cards.
- AMD skipped GPU announcements at two consecutive CES keynotes and botched a driver update that alienated its own user base.
Jon Peddie Research this week released fourth-quarter 2025 data on the add-in board GPU market, and the picture is lopsided. Nvidia controls roughly 94% of discrete graphics card shipments, up 1.6 percentage points from the prior quarter. AMD lost the same 1.6 points, dropping to roughly 5%. Intel remained flat at around 1%, a rounding error in what has become a one-company market.
The quarterly shift was modest. But AMD's trajectory through 2025 is worse. At the end of Q4 2024, the company still held roughly 17% of AIB shipments. By Q1 2025, that had cratered to 8% as Nvidia's GeForce RTX 50-series flooded the channel. It fell to 6% by midyear, ticked up to 7% in Q3, then reversed in Q4. Over four quarters, AMD lost more than two-thirds of its discrete GPU market share.
Total add-in card shipments fell 4.4% sequentially in Q4, landing at 11.5 million units, despite this being the holiday quarter when sales typically peak. Year-over-year, shipments rose 36%, but only because the market was so depressed a year earlier.
JPR attributed the sequential decline to rising memory costs and tariff uncertainty. DRAM shortages pushed GPU prices higher throughout 2025, and the threat of tariffs prompted consumers to pull purchases forward into Q2 and Q3, leaving Q4 soft. The percentage of desktop PCs shipping with a discrete card sank to 55%, down 12.3 points from Q3.
Steam's February 2026 hardware survey points in the same direction. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 surged to 9.42% of surveyed systems, the largest single-month jump for any GPU the survey has recorded. AMD's most-used discrete card was the Radeon RX 7800 XT, an RDNA 3 part from 2023. Its newer RDNA 4-based Radeon RX 9000 series, which had only recently appeared in the survey, vanished from the February data entirely.
Why AMD's GPU market share collapsed in 2025
In September 2024, at IFA in Berlin, AMD's Jack Huynh, the company's senior vice president and general manager of the Computing and Graphics Business Group, laid out the logic to Tom's Hardware. Asked whether AMD would compete with Nvidia at the top of the GPU stack, Huynh said the company was prioritizing mainstream volume over chasing the high end. His goal was to reach 40% to 50% share to attract developer support.
That goal now looks distant. AMD's RDNA 4-based Radeon RX 9070 series launched in Q1 2025 and was reasonably well-received on price-performance, but it didn't move the needle on share. The company omitted GPUs from its CES 2025 keynote, telling reporters it wanted to "do justice" to the launch separately. At CES 2026, it skipped consumer GPUs again, spending the keynote on data center AI, the Helios rack-scale platform, and Zen 6 server chips.
Then came the driver controversy. In October 2025, AMD placed its Radeon RX 5000 and RX 6000 series into "maintenance mode," initially signaling these GPUs would receive only critical fixes, not new game optimizations. Users were angry: AMD's RX 6000 cards were less than four years old, and RDNA 2-based chips power the Steam Deck and ROG Xbox Ally. AMD scrambled to clarify, eventually promising continued game support, but trust took a hit. A separate changelog error in the same update wrongly claimed AMD was disabling USB-C charging on RX 7900 cards, its own flagships. The episode left Radeon looking disorganized at the worst possible time.
Intel's position is even more marginal. After entering the discrete market with Arc Alchemist in 2022 and following up with Battlemage in late 2024, the company has yet to crack 1% share in any sustained way. A high-end desktop Arc GPU remains unshipped and unannounced.
What Nvidia's GPU monopoly means for PC gaming and graphics card prices
JPR forecasts a compound annual decline of 5.9% in AIB shipments through 2028, driven by rising prices and memory shortages. The installed base of discrete GPUs will grow as existing cards stay in systems longer, but new-card sales are shrinking.
For AMD, the question is whether its mainstream-scale strategy can survive a market where it sells roughly one card for every nineteen Nvidia ships. Developer support requires volume. Volume requires competitive products. Competitive products require developer support. The flywheel works in both directions, and right now, it is spinning away from AMD.
Competition in the GPU market has not disappeared. It has just become a contest for second place in a market where second place is worth about a paisa on the rupee.
