Add-in-Board Shipments Increased by 25.7% Year-over-Year

A newly released report by Jon Peddie Research shows that shipments of add-in-board graphic cards in Q3 2021 increased by 10.9% quarter-over-quarter and by 25.7% compared to last year. NVIDIA remained the undisputed market leader when it comes to units shipped, but AMD’s shipments also increased from the previous year.

In Q3, there were 12.7 million AIB units shipped globally, a decent increase compared to Q2’s 11.47 million. NVIDIA’s market share now sits at 78.2%, largely led by the new generation RTX cards. NVIDIA’s shipments alone increased by 9.3% quarter-over-quarter and 27.15 YoY. While AMD is far behind, the new AMD Radeon RX 6800 is a worthy competitor to NVIDIA’s RTX 3000 series, keeping AMD in the fight.

The term add-in-board denotes all non-integrated GPUs, bought either from resellers or as part of pre-made high-end configurations. Hence, AIB shipments pretty much encompass all consumer-level shipments made for graphic cards.

The jump in graphic card shipments comes as no surprise since they’re in extremely high demand nowadays. PC gaming demands increasingly robust hardware, and the recent releases of popular video games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Assassin's Creed Valhalla are only fuelling the demand for better GPUs.

However, the biggest culprit behind the spike in demand is crypto mining. The second most popular crypto around, Ethereum, uses GPU power for the mining process. Due to the profitability of crypto mining, miners keep buying up high-end cards and denying gamers access to GPUs. Coupled with the global chip shortage and supply chain issues, obtaining new graphic cards is increasingly challenging for consumers.

While AIB shipments increased by 10.9% in Q3 compared to the same quarter last year, they’re still below the ten-year average of 17.1%. On the other hand, GPU shipments have outpaced CPU shipments by nearly 3%.

While the spike in shipments is good news for the manufacturers, the ongoing shortages and the prevalence of crypto mining make the future uncertain for gamers looking to get their hands on newer graphic cards.