The third quarter of 2010 was not good for shipments of graphics adapters at all. The only category that got a boost was desktop discrete graphics cards, whereas mobile adapters and all integrated solutions declined in terms of unit shipments, according to numbers released by Mercury Research.

The whole market of PC graphics adapters (including discrete and integrated processors for desktops and laptops) was down 4.9% sequentially and totaled 116.365 million of units. Without any surprises, Intel Corp. continued to be the leader with 54.6% of the market followed by Advanced Micro Devices' ATI unit (23%) as well as Nvidia Corp. (21.1%).

*Shipments are in millions.

But even shipments of Intel were below those in the second quarter of the year by 4.2%. Shipments of ATI Radeon graphics processors declined by 10.7%, which is a significant drop. In fact, only Nvidia Corp. managed to sell more graphics adapters in Q3 than it did in Q2, even though the increase of unit sales is just 1.5%. There are two reasons why Nvidia managed to boost its shipments and share in the third quarter (vs. Q2): the company sold 28.7% more desktop discrete graphics cards and 41% more chipsets with integrated graphics for desktops.

*Shipments are in millions.

Two categories that suffered the most due to local market weakness in the third quarter are discrete graphics processors for mobile computers (-22.77%) as well as integrated graphics processors for laptops (-11.1%). Considering how strong mobile graphics adapters - both standalone and built-in - were in the second quarter, it seems that in Q3 there was a lot to do with correction (as OEMs and resellers had to sell the available inventory).

ATI, graphics business unit of Advanced Micro Devices, managed to maintain its lead on the market of discrete graphics adapters in Q3 2010. The company shipped 16.95 million of standalone GPUs, whereas Nvidia supplied 16.7 million of discrete graphics processors.

Please note that Mercury Research market data was found on the Internet. While it seems to be accurate, some of the numbers in this news-story are approximates.

Tags: ATI, AMD, Nvidia, Radeon, Geforce, Evergreen, Fermi, Business, mercury research, S3 Graphics, Via Technologies, SiS, Matrox