Published in Graphics

The graphics card add-on is a thing of the past

by on26 August 2014

Jon Peddie Research claims it is a dodo

Jon Peddie Research has issued a report on GPU sales and reached the conclusion that the days of the add-on graphics card are fading.

According to JPR’s report, sales of add-on graphics cards declined 17.5 per cent quarter-over-quarter and 17.6 per cent year-over-year. In comparison, last year’s quarter-over-quarter rate for the same period was 5.5 per cent. Nvidia took the biggest kicking in terms of decreases, seeing a decline of 21 per cent. AMD had a fall of 10.7 per cent.

Some of the decline can be put down to improvements to CPU-GPU integration and both Intel and AMD have been doing better at this in the last two years. But enthusiast gamers are facing the problem that their old cards are good enough for the majority of today’s games.

So far there has not been much of a move to 4K gaming, which could improve GPU sales, but the 4K monitor is still a long way from being cheap enough. The cheapest models retail for about €500/$600, but unfurtonately they are crippled by high response time and low refresh rates.

At the moment many games developers are building for consoles and then porting over to the PC, which means that graphics cards are hardly breaking out in a sweat trying to run them.

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