Despite of the fact that graphics market was on the rise in the second quarter of the year, Advanced Micro Devices did not manage to improve its positions and its market share dropped once again. But its main rival Nvidia managed to capitalize on the fact that ATI, graphics product group of AMD, started to deliver its new mainstream DirectX 10 chips only in June.

Traditionally, the second quarter is slow for the computer industry, but this time it was up 3% sequentially to 81.3 million units, of which 24.5 million graphics adapters were for mobile computers, whereas about 56.8 million devices were intended for desktop systems, according to a recent report by Jon Peddie Research. In the previous quarter the share of mobile graphics adapters was approximately 30.3%, while in Q2 the share increased to 31.2%, which emphasizes growing popularity of notebooks. Compared to the same quarter last year shipments were up 8.2%.

Nvidia Corp. made significant grains in Q2 both in terms of share and shipments , while AMD and Intel saw more typical results for the time period. Via Technologies saw a slight rise, Silicon Integrated Systems lost more than a third of its shipments in the second quarter, while Matrox Graphics continued its trip downwards..

On the desktop Nvidia was the clear winner, claiming 43% against Intel’s 38.5%, while AMD had a modest gain to 23%. But in the mobile market Advanced Micro Devices saw a decline to 21%,  Intel held its dominate position and grew slightly to 51.5%, with Nvidia number two at 27%.

The main reason for Nvidia’s triumph during the second quarter was flawless execution and delivery of DirectX 10-compliant graphics processors for the mainstream markets well ahead of AMD, who started to ship its ATI Radeon HD 2400 and 2600 only in June. Given that during the quarter contemporary microprocessors from AMD could not show performance higher compared to Intel Core 2-series products, the share of AMD’s chipsets with built-in graphics core was on the decline, which also resulted in just a tiny gain in terms of desktop market share.