All three companies sell both NVIDIA and AMD products

Jan 27, 2015 09:53 GMT  ·  By

Advanced Micro Devices and NVIDIA may be the ones that create the graphics processing units (GPUs) and the basic design for a graphics card, but it's ultimately their OEMs that sell the products.

Owing to large shipments of cards from both suppliers, the world's best-known vendors of video cards are ASUS, Gigabyte and Micro-Star International.

Both AMD and NVIDIA have exclusive partners, OEMs that for one reason or another only deal with one or the other. Contract exclusivity clauses are hardly unheard of.

However, Gigabyte, ASUS and MSI never yielded in front of such pressure, and they have a solid enough standing that they can merrily go on selling both kinds.

This is why they continue to sell the largest numbers of cards per year. In 2014, the three of them together easily exceeded the 10 million mark.

Top three graphics card vendors ship 12 million boards

MSI, Gigabyte and ASUS cumulatively shipped twelve million graphics adapters throughout the previous year, according to news and rumors site DigiTimes.

ASUS was in the lead, with over 5 million boards. It was followed by Gigabyte with over 3.6 million and MSI with 2.8 to 3 million.

A high number, but unfortunately not as high as in other years. Not because of anything lacking in their strategies, but because video boards have been selling less in general.

According to the report, 2014 ended with overall worldwide graphics card shipments that were 10% below those in 2013.

This is attributed to there being fewer newcomers to the cryptographic currency market. Back in 2013, many people bought high-end graphics cards because their parallel processing capabilities made it easy for them to mine for Bitcoins or similar virtual currency.

The trend did not repeat in 2014, though we can't help but feel that this number of customers should not account for the full 10%. After all, crypto-currency miners usually buy top-end boards, which in turn barely make up 10% of the market themselves.

Whatever the case, video board sales have gone down, even as the shares of smaller providers like Onda and Colorful are going up.

Expectations for 2015

None have been expressed so far, given how early it is. Depending on whether next-gen adapters like AMD Radeon R9 390X debut now or in April, they could be higher or smaller. A further yearly drop is quite likely, but we may yet be surprised.

AMD Radeon R9 290X
AMD Radeon R9 290X

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