In a recent quarterly add-in-card report market research firm Jon Peddie Research have found that more than 129 models of graphics cards are offered on the market nowadays. The company notes that the most dense product lines are in the high-end and mainstream markets, whereas only 18 models are offered in the entry-level market.

“We have found that the semiconductor companies are offering 129 different versions of their chips which translates into 18 Value, 57 Mainstream, 42 Performance, and 12 Workstation AIB models on the market being offered by six discrete GPU suppliers, 3Dlabs, ATI, NVIDIA, Matrox, S3/VIA, and XGI,” the company said in a statement sent to press.

The research firm notes that despite of growing popularity of chipsets with integrated graphics, all the market segments now offer 20% more products in all categories when compared to 2004. A high number of offerings in the mainstream and performance market segments indicates that there are, on the one hand, more people looking for a relatively expensive graphics card, and, on the other hand, not a lot of users interested in low-cost add-in graphics products due to shift to integrated chipsets and notebook computers.

Jon Peddie Research estimates that about 60.2 million PC graphics devices were sold by eight suppliers globally in Q1 2005, a 6.2% decline from the previous quarter and a 4.9% increase over the same period the previous year.

Jon Peddie has also just wrapped up an installed base add-in-card study and found there will be 496 million add-in graphics boards in service throughout the world by the end of 2005 and all of them are DirectX 7.0-compliant or better.