PC market ‘chaos’ causes slowdown in consumer GPUs

PC graphics shipments grew 2.5 percent last quarter, a report by Jon Peddie Associates found Monday. Data center GPUs, however, grew an average of 145 percent. And that’s the state of the market right now, which analyst Jon Peddie generously described as “chaos.”

Peddie’s report found that the PC GPU market grew to 76.6 million units during the third quarter of 2025. Over the next five years, discrete GPU penetration in the PC market will rise to about 25 percent of all PCs, the report found.

Peddie’s report focused on the GPU portion of the market, which included both discrete GPUs as well as those integrated into the systems-on-chip which also integrate CPUs. In desktop, the combined growth rate was 10.7 percent, while laptops grew by 1.4 percent. Overall, GPU shipments grew 2.5 percent sequentially, and 4.0 percent compared to a year ago.

Peddie’s report only revealed certain numbers, holding back some for clients or for future reports. Some were simply obscured by other factors. The total GPU share is a good example: During the third quarter of 2025, Intel’s total PC GPU share was 61 percent — basically representative of every CPU with integrated graphics Intel shipped. Likewise, AMD’s share was 15 percent (down 2 percentage points from a year ago) but its total consisted of both integrated and discrete graphics. Nvidia’s share totaled the remaining 24 percent.

Ironically, 2025 began with the launch of the Nvidia GeForce 5000 family, and subsequently concerns about the available supply and what it would do to pricing. But as 2025 wore on, GPU prices dropped to somewhat-near-MSRP levels, while PC makers started panicking about the supply of other components, especially DRAM and SSDs. Manufacturers clearly prioritized AI “hyperscaler” companies, and shipped higher-margin silicon like enterprise GPUs to those companies, rather than redirecting their efforts toward consumer GPUs.

Still, GPU shipments were below the average 10-year growth rate of 4.7 percent for the PC GPU market, Peddie found. Data center GPU shipments skyrocketed.

“The PC and GPU market has been anything but stable or predictable,” said Dr. Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research, in a statement. “Memory prices increasing, uncertainty about tariffs, confusion about what an AI PC is, and mixed messages about Windows 10 have disrupted planning and seasonality. Some might call it chaos.”