Despite the launch of the RX 9070, AMD's dominance in the desktop GPU market has plummeted to an all-time low, leaving Nvidia to widen its lead.
Sneak Peek: AMD's Radeon RX 9070-series Faces a Tough Battle in Q1 2025 Despite Strong Value Proposition
In the latest market report from Jon Peddie Research, AMD's desktop GPU market share has dipped to an all-time low, despite the launch of new products like the Radeon RX 9070-series. The quarter saw a substantial increase in discrete GPU shipments for desktop PCs, with a total of 9.2 million units shipped, marking a 8.5% quarter-over-quarter and 5.3% year-over-year growth.
However, the market dynamics are skewed heavily in favor of Nvidia, who currently holds around 92% of the market share compared to AMD's 8%. Nvidia managed to sell millions of its new GeForce RTX 50-series GPUs, while AMD struggled to sell around 750,000 add-in-boards.
The numbers from Jon Peddie Research paint a bleak picture for AMD, but they may not reflect the full story. Lisa Su, Chief Executive of AMD, stated that the launch of the Radeon RX 9070-series was AMD's most successful product launch in terms of first-week sales. However, the research monitors how many GPU chips each company sells-in to its partners per quarter, not the number of cards sold through retailers.
Images of AMD's early Navi 48 graphics processors suggest that production of the actual silicon started approximately 90 days prior to the official launch in March 2025. This indicates that AMD had been building up inventory for several months ahead of the release. Although precise figures are unavailable, it's reasonable to suspect that AMD's partners shipped well over a million Radeon RX 9070-series graphics cards during the quarter.
Despite the dismal GPU sales, Nvidia had a stellar quarter, selling around 8.46 million standalone graphics processors, their best results in three years, particularly when considering the expensive products they sold during that period. In stark contrast, AMD's GPU sales declined in Q1 2025, a rare occurrence considering new halo products were launched.
While the discrepancy between AMD's sales and its successful product launch remains unclear, it's possible that the company didn’t ramp up shipments or production of its Radeon RX 9000-series GPUs in late Q4 2024 – early Q1 2025, leading to shortages in the second quarter.
In other industry news, the desktop CPU market contracted sharply as volumes dropped by 14.5% year-over-year and 20.6% sequentially. The trade wars and changing import/export rules under Trump's administration are causing turmoil in the PC market, with some suppliers holding orders and others increasing them, hoping to lock in prices.
In conclusion, AMD's Radeon RX 9070-series showed promise with its superior price-performance and wider memory bus, but failed to challenge Nvidia's dominance in the broader market. Factors such as brand loyalty, superior ecosystem, perceived overall performance, and AI-driven demand favored Nvidia, making it difficult for AMD to gain significant market share.
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According to industry reports, despite AMD's strong value proposition with the Radeon RX 9070-series, the company faced tough competition in the Q1 2025 market, particularly in the finance realm, as Nvidia's GeForce RTX 50-series GPUs saw significant sales. Moreover, the rapid advancements in technology might have influenced the preference for Nvidia's superior ecosystem and AI-driven performance.
