12-Year GPU Market Share History Of Nvidia And AMD Revealed

An image has cropped up on a number of forums over the weekend, depicting AMD and Nvidia’s respective market share during the past 12 years. It’s a fascinating look at the disparity between two competing technology giants, but it doesn’t necessarily make for nice reading from an AMD perspective.

Nvidia’s dominance has long been known, but this latest chart indicates AMD's got some serious catching up to do on the graphics card front. While for much of the 12-year period Nvidia has outsold AMD, nowhere has AMD’s market position been worse than right now. The launches of the GTX 980, 970 and 960, without reply from AMD, has seen market share slump to just 24%.

The data has been collate from various research and aggregated quarterly reports. What we can see here is a pretty widespread dominance from Nvidia; the last time AMD was the dominant force was back in 2005 with X800 series. Since then the market shares have remained fairly consistent, but AMD's slow response to the best-selling GTX 970, despite the false specs backlash that hit Nvidia's card, has seen a sharp drop off.

AMD has recently confirmed it's next generation of graphics cards will be launched this quarter. The Radeon R9 300 series GPUs are expected in June, possibly to be unveiled at the Computex Taipei 2015 trade show. Early reports indicate the entire family of graphics cards is to be unleashed at once, and that moment can't come quick enough for AMD.

Do you think we could see a huge turnaround in market share once the next generation of Radeon cards hit?