Jon Peddie Research (JPR), the industry's research and consulting firm for graphics and multimedia, announced estimated graphics add-in board (AIB) shipments and sales’ market share for Q2 2011. Shipments of graphics cards for desktops declined 15.2% to 16.1 million in the second quarter of this year.

Overall shipments of graphics AIBs for the quarter came in below the last quarter at 16.1 million units compared to 19.01 million for Q1 2011. Shipments in Q1 2011 did not exceed the same quarter a year ago. Shipments during the second quarter of 2011 behaved according to past years with regard to seasonality but were lower on a year-to-year comparison for the quarter. Q2 2011 was down from the previous quarter by 15.2%, and the ten year average for the quarter is -11.2%.

The evolution of the graphics market has resulted in two major super-categories of graphics AIBs: those which carry Nvidia graphics chips and those which carry AMD chips. Nvidia GPU-based boards declined slight by 0.1% from Q1, while AMD-based boards increased 0.1% for the same period. On a year-to-year basis AMD lost market share by 0.8% while Nvidia gained 1.1% of market share. Obviously, these are not huge moves in the market and Nvidia still leads in unit shipments. Nvidia was the leader in unit shipments for the quarter, elevated by double attach and GPU-compute/CUDA sales.

Sales of AIB products have been directly impacted by the rise of integrated CPUs from Intel and AMD, which have increasingly powerful graphics.

The AIB market is fueled at the high-end by the enthusiast gamer, small in volume (~3 million a year) but high in dollars (average spend for an AIB ~$300). The AIB shipment volume comes from the performance and mainstream segments. GPU-compute is adding to sales on the high end. The Workstation Market is smaller in unit sales than the enthusiast segment but characterized by even higher average selling prices (ASPs) (average spend for an AIB ~$415).

For the year, the AIB market is expected to hit $13.8 billion, down 33% from 2010 due to a pull back by consumers and a gradual decline in ASP.

The JPR AIB report covers seven regions and reports on the value of AIB sales and units in those regions. The Q2’11 edition of Jon Peddie Research's AIB report is available now in both electronic and hard copy editions, and can be purchased for $995. The annual subscription price for JPR's AIB report is $3,500 and includes four quarterly issues. Full subscribers to JPR services receive Tech Watch (the company's bi-weekly report), and are eligible for a 10% discount. 

Tags: JPR, AMD, ATI, Nvidia, Business, Geforce, Radeon