Graphics Card Shipments in 2015 Down Big, New GPU Architectures Could Save The Day

Digitimes is reporting that worldwide desktop graphics card shipments dropped by roughly 20% YoY and that total shipments was under 30 million units for 2015. The declines impacted both AMD and NVIDIA, but it appears that the AMD declines are more severe. Digitimes went as far as saying that some smaller Add-In Board (AIB) Partners might actually be forced to end graphics cards sales if they can’t increase sales this year. Most of the gamers and prosumers that we have spoken with in recent weeks are waiting for AMD’s Polaris and NVIDIA’s Pascal based graphics cards to come out. Both companies will be releasing their next-generation GPU architectures and that will surely spur sales!

The largest graphics card player Palit Microsystems, which has several brands including Palit and Galaxy, shipped 6.9-7.1 million graphics cards in 2015, down 10% on year. Asustek Computer shipped 4.5-4.7 million units in 2015, while Colorful shipped 3.9-4.1 million units, and is aiming to raise its shipments by 10% on year in 2016. Micro-Star International (MSI) enjoyed healthy graphics card shipments at 3.45-3.55 million in 2015, up 15% on year, and EVGA, which has tight partnerships with Nvidia, also saw a significant shipment growth, while Gigabyte suffered from a slight drop on year. Sapphire and PowerColor suffered dramatic drops in shipments in 2015. – Digitimes

Many gamers purchased NVIDIA Maxwell based video cards like the very popular GeForce GTX 970 and GeForce GTX 980 4GB desktop graphics card back in 2014 when it debuted and haven’t had a real need to update. With the increase of DX12 game titles and Virtual Reality headsets finally rolling out, we can see many of those high-end users itching to upgrade to the latest and greatest technology out there. Besides the usual GPU improvements one can expect with a new card generation there will also be big changes to the memory as NVIDIA and AMD move over to HBM2 and GDDR5X memory solutions.