AMD’s share of the GPU market has fallen to a measly 18%

AMD and NVIDIA have been battling for control over the GPU market for almost a decade now and it’s become clear that AMD is losing… badly. Around this time last year, the company had a 38% share of the discrete GPU market, which is still pretty good, but that percentage has been cut in half in the year since then. According to a report from Mercury Research, AMD now has a measly 18% market share, and while that number is expected to increase in the coming months thanks to the release of the company’s new 300-series cards, it’s doubtful that it’ll be a significant increase. 

In just 12 months AMD’s has lost more than half its hold in the discrete GPU market share, dropping from 38 per cent in Q2 2014 to only 18 per cent in Q2 2015. Data released by Mercury Research is obvious good news for NVIDIA, with their market share making up AMD’s lost ground by expanding to 82 per cent. The last year included in the data included only one major graphics card release by AMD, with the Fury/300-series at the end of Q2 2015 on June 16. Meanwhile NVIDIA released their 900-series of graphics cards, including the GTX 980, TITAN X and GTX 980 Ti. The effect of the Fury and 300-series cards on the GPU market share landscape will unlikely be seen until the next quarter. AMD will hope it’s Fury cards, featuring new High Bandwidth Memory, will reignite sales and turn around the damaging trend. However the 300-series cards were released to lackluster reviews after it was quickly found to include rebranded versions of the previous 200-series. Looking ahead, the AMD R9 Nano is expected to be released in the coming weeks. It is aimed at retaining high performance while reducing power consumption, an area NVIDIA has recently outperformed AMD.