Nvidia may have felt a drop in sales recently, but here’s the better news for Team Green: a significant increase in market share, with the company remaining by far the dominant discrete (standalone) GPU power. Moreover, the RTX 3060 now seems to carry a really healthy number of units.
First, let’s look at this market share data from an analytics firm Jon Peddi’s research (opens in a new tab) (JPR) as he noted Wccftech (opens in a new tab).
Statistics for the second quarter of this year show that Nvidia has a 79% market share, a large increase of 4% compared to the first quarter, with AMD dropping from 24% to 20% in the same period. Intel has a remaining 1% of the market with the new Arc discrete GPUs, so Team Blue is now entering the desktop graphics scene.
Compared to the same quarter last year, Nvidia is almost in the same position: Team Green had an 80% share in Q2 2021 and now has 79%, losing that single percentage point to Intel (AMD was at 20% a year ago and remains at 20% as mentioned).
Moreover, how Eteknik (opens in a new tab) flagged, browsing the latest Steam Hardware Survey (opens in a new tab) (for August), one GPU that seems to be gaining a serious momentum in sales and helping the Nvidia cause is the RTX 3060.
The RTX 3060 desktop graphics card now ranks sixth in overall Steam gaming sales charts, with a solid growth of 0.66% in August, giving it an overall market share of 3.24%. There is little behind the 3060 laptop GPU, which comes fifth with 3.39%.
So, if you add them together you get 6.63%, which technically makes the RTX 3060 (both desktop and laptop) more popular than the top GTX 1060 which has 6.6% (after a fairly large decrease by 0.52). % this month).
All of the top 10 GPUs – which are Nvidia models – have actually declined in popularity, with the exception of the RTX 3060 and RTX 3070 cards in tenth place, which saw a marginal increase of 0.03%.
Analysis: Some consolation for Nvidia in difficult times
As we mentioned at the beginning, Nvidia has had a hard time with declining GPU supply levels recently, and demand was mitigated by the unfortunate situation where the company overproduced RTX 3000 inventory.
JPR statistics show that everyone is going through a tough time, with overall discrete graphics card sales down 22% compared to the previous quarter. Nvidia has at least some comfort in regaining its dominant position in the second quarter compared to the first quarter, and the big progress of the RTX 3060 is also a positive sign.
It is widely predicted that there will be further price cuts for Nvidia GPUs – as well as AMD GPUs – as well as AMD GPUs in the near future, as Team Red also wants to clean up its current-gen inventory before next-gen products arrive later this year – and that should fuel RTX sales fires. 3000 onwards.
So far, we’ve only seen big discounts on high-end Nvidia graphics cards – the RTX 3090 and its Ti version, and the RTX 3080 Ti in particular – but the price cuts are likely to fade away even further. Whether they will make it all the way to the RTX 3060 is unclear, and we must bear in mind that its successor, the RTX 4060, is not on the horizon (not yet). While the RTX 4070 and newer is definitely there, at least in theory, even if rumor has it there could be something more distinct, spread out to the market, with larger than usual gaps between these higher-gen models.
All of this means that the RTX 3060’s price may not move significantly, but even a small drop in price can boost sales of this mid-range GPU even more, in addition to the already good progress seen last month. This graphics card could still play a pivotal role for Nvidia even as the launch of the next-gen Lovelace is already underway, considering we’re not at all sure when the 4060 could arrive. And even after the 4060 debut, the 3060 may remain a cheaper alternative (Team Green has already talked about a release time where both generations of GPUs will be combined).