Discrete graphics card shipments down year on year!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

However,AMD gained marketshare from Nvidia in Q2 2012:

http://www.techpowerup.com/171198/Gr...ports-JPR.html

[davesom555]

APU / People using tablet pcs over normal pcs to blame?! Or increased prices of GPUs?

[Pob255]

A bit of all of them I think, a shift away from pc's, better onboard gpu's for normal day-to-day use, rising costs and there's not many games that are really pushing the limits of cards from a year or two ago.
I moved from a gtx260 to a gtx560ti but in all honesty I've not seen any major change in performance on any of the games I've played.

[Megabiv]

No surprise, I mean a few years back you pretty much needed a highend card for high res good looking games, not so anymore. Graphics have stagnated somewhat in the last couple of years, not badly but its hardly the progression we used to get with games. Take Unreal 3, that game is about 5 years old and isn't really different from games released this year. Now cast your mind back to 2000 or even 2005 and think what a 5 year old game would look like, much more of a dramatic change. Plus i remember the Asus Mars being released at £900 and being an elitist cash no object experiment, now it seems that that price is the normal for dual GPU cards (GTX 690)....absolutely ridiculous.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

What is surprising that despite the release of the GTX670 and GTX680,Nvidia shipped 1 million less graphics cards!!

It shows you that cheaper cards are more important.

[marshalex]

Like what's been said above, there's not been as much of a need for people to upgrade with games not advancing as much graphically. Tablet gaming has taken off (most games I play currently are on iPad). Interesting though

[pctech2012]

On my first custom build PC which replaced an off the shelf job from a certain electrical retailer I paid out £300+ for a then cutting edge Nvidia 7900GTX.

The PC over the time mainly for browsing and occasionally for a bit of gaming so this time I only spent about 80 quid on the card and invested more in the CPU.

As has been said though graphics haven't moved on that much and people are using phones and tablets more.

In the future I think most of the graphics 'heavy lifting' will be done server side on online games.