GPU shipments increased by 35% in Q1 2021

The PC GPU market continued to grow in 2021 despite supply constraints. Compared to Q1 2020, GPU shipments increased by 35 percent (year-on-year) in the first quarter of this year, coming close to matching Q4 2020 sales, avoiding the new-year drop off that we typically expect to see. 

According to analysis from Jon Peddie Research, the PC GPU market, which includes discrete graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD, reached 119 million units shipped in Q1 2021. Speaking of AMD and Nvidia, both companies saw market share changes over the quarter, with Nvidia growing by 0.62 percent compared to Q4 2020, meanwhile AMD's overall market share percentage reportedly decreased by 0.12 percent quarter-to-quarter.

An interesting highlight to note is that between 2020 and 2025, discrete GPUs are expected to grow and be found in 26 percent of PCs shipped globally, reaching a total of 3,333 million units. The CPU market also seems to be growing, with a 39 percent increase in units shipped year-on-year.

Shipments of desktop graphics cards sold by board partners like Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, Sapphire and others, saw an increase of 7 percent between Q4 2020 and Q1 2021.

We are likely to see some additional changes in Q2 and Q3 2021, as Nvidia has just launched the new RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti graphics cards, meanwhile, AMD has begun shipping Radeon RX 6000M series GPUs for laptops.

KitGuru Says: The pandemic has led to a huge increase in demand for PCs and components like discrete graphics cards. Unfortunately, while more units are being shipped, meeting this increased demand continues to be a challenge. 

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