A new report has revealed that the PC industry sold over 250 million GPUs in 2024. That’s not just discrete gaming graphics cards, but also GPUs for servers and workstations, as well as integrated GPUs, with the entire market growing 6% year-on-year.
With PC gaming exploding in numerous ways, including the race to make the best gaming handheld, the presence of GPUs is expanding all over the place. New chips such as the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme found in the Asus ROG Ally house a full GPU in an all-in-one chip with the CPU cores, and that’s in addition to the best graphics card models for gaming.
The report from Jon Peddie Research also points out that AMD and Nvidia ship millions of GPUs worldwide every year. These aren’t solely for gaming, of course, but also for AI, servers, and supercomputers, as well as other GPU-compute applications, such as video post-production.
It also shows that suppliers managed to ship out 18.2 million discrete graphics cards in just the first half of 2024. This is a massive jump from 2023, with a 46% increase. Of course, the AI boom has also played a major part in this boom. AI projects rely on the matrix cores in GPUs to power them, to the point where the US government has blocked Nvidia from shipping cards such as the RTX 4090 to China, hoping to curb their advancements.
Notably, the report provides evidence that there was also a dip in sales toward the end of the year. A part of this is attributed to changes internally at AMD, as the company readjusts inventory. It might also be due to PC gaming fans not picking up new GPUs at the end of the year, especially when the RTX 5090 release date is on the horizon.
Cards from the last few generations have held strong, despite major advances in GPU technology. Resolution upscaling and frame generation, via Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR, can elevate aging cards, enabling you to squeeze more life and performance out of them. On top of this, many of the most popular games are lasting far longer, with major live service titles like Fortnite, Roblox, and League of Legends not needing the latest and greatest hardware.
Indeed, if you look at the Steam Hardware Survey, which collates PC users’ choice of hardware, the most popular GPU is the RTX 3060 from 2021. We’ll have to wait and see how the Nvidia RTX 5000 series changes those numbers in a year or so.