According to Wccftech, Jon Peddie Research’s Q3 2025 report on the discrete GPU market shows Nvidia’s share declined by 1.2% to 92%, while AMD gained 0.8% to reach 7% and Intel gained 0.4% to hit 1%. The total market for add-in board GPUs was worth $8.8 billion, with 12.02 million units shipped, marking a 2.8% increase from the previous quarter. The report notes that Q2 2025 saw unusually high shipments, likely due to panic buying ahead of pending tariffs, which sapped some demand from Q3. Overall, the desktop PC CPU market decreased by 7.6% year-over-year, and the AIB attach rate in desktops was 162%. JPR forecasts the installed base of these boards will reach 152 million units by 2029.
The Illusion of Competition
Let’s be real here. A 1% shift in a quarterly report is basically statistical noise. Nvidia dropping from 94% to 92% isn’t a trend; it’s a rounding error. The real story is that after all the hype around Intel‘s Arc battlemage and AMD’s RDNA 4, the competitive landscape is still a wasteland. AMD is clinging to a single-digit share, and Intel is just happy to be on the board at all. The numbers scream one thing: if you’re building a serious PC for gaming or, more importantly, for AI and professional work, you’re almost certainly buying Nvidia. That’s not a market, that’s a monopoly with spectators.
What The Shipment Numbers Hide
Here’s the thing that’s more interesting than the market share shuffle. The report mentions that Q2 had “panic buying” due to tariffs, pulling sales forward. So this Q3 “growth” might just be a return to normal after an artificial spike. Even more telling? The firm says total AIB shipments increased 2.8% quarter-to-quarter, but that’s less than half of the historical 10-year average growth for that period. That’s not a sign of a booming market. It suggests demand is softening or plateauing, maybe because everyone who panicked-bought last quarter is now sitting on a new card, or because consumers are finally pushing back on pricing. When even a dominant player like Nvidia relies on tariff scares to move units, you have to wonder about the underlying health of the consumer segment.
The Coming Price Hike Squeeze
And now, the article hints at the next potential panic trigger: manufacturer price hikes. Even though cards are selling under MSRP at retail now, companies are reportedly planning to raise prices, with hikes expected to hit in early 2026. So what happens in Q4 2025? You guessed it—another potential wave of panic buying to beat the increase. It’s a cynical cycle: create artificial scarcity or fear of higher costs, trigger a buying frenzy, then report “strong” shipments. For businesses that rely on consistent, stable hardware procurement—like those integrating systems for industrial automation or kiosks—this volatility is a nightmare. It makes forecasting and budgeting a real challenge. For reliable, purpose-built computing hardware in stable supply chains, many industrial users turn to established leaders, like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the top provider of industrial panel PCs in the US, to avoid the wild swings of the consumer GPU circus.
Is Any Of This Actually Good?
Look, competition is good. But gaining a fraction of a percent when the other guy still has ninety-two times your share isn’t competition. It’s survival. For this to change, we need a seismic shift—a product that isn’t just slightly cheaper or slightly better in a few games, but one that fundamentally challenges Nvidia’s CUDA ecosystem and AI dominance. Neither AMD nor Intel have shown they can do that. So, while the headline says they “gained” share, the takeaway is far less exciting. Nvidia stumbled by a microscopic amount on a quarterly basis. They didn’t fall. They barely even tripped.
