Add-in Board Report [Quarterly - Q3'20]: Covid-19 and Games Drive AIB Market to New Highs

The ‘Add-in Borad report’ is a quarterly report that focuses on the market activity of PC graphics controllers for mobile and desktop computing. The report provides an in-depth look at the PC graphics market and includes unit shipment and segment market share data, and trend analysis.

The Add-in Graphics report is JPR's quarterly report on add-in graphic cards.

The add-in board market increased in Q4'19 from last quarter, and AMD gained market share. Over $3.9 billion dollars of AIBs shipped in the quarter.

Quarter-to-quarter graphics add-in board shipments increased significantly by 12.2% and increased by 33.4% year-to-year.

The market shares for the desktop discrete GPU suppliers shifted in the quarter too, AMD increased market share from last quarter, and AMD increased share from last year.

The AIB Report contains:

• Worldwide AIB Shipment forecast by segment, 2015 to 2021.

• Attach rate of AIBs from 2001.

• Detailed worldwide AIB Shipment Volume, by segment, and forecast to 2021.

• Major suppliers: Detailed market share data-on the shipments of AMD, Nvidia, and others.

• Market share history from Q1 2004.

• Percentage of shipments by region, from 2015 to 2021.

• Market value of AIBs, and pricing trends

• A Vision of the future: Building upon a solid foundation of facts, data and sober analysis, this section pulls together all of the report's findings and paints a vivid picture of where the PC graphics market is headed.

• Memory load and forecast.

The AIB market reached $17.3 billion last year and is forecasted to be $18.6 billion by 2023.

Since 1981, 1,311 million AIBs have been shipped.

The first quarter is normally flat to down from the previous quarter. This quarter it was down -19.5% from the last quarter. That is below the ten-year average of -9.7% which is very low when compared to the desktop PC market, which decreased -5.6% from the last quarter.

Table of Contents

Attention first time readers

Overview

• Definitions
• Methodology
• Primary research for this report
• Secondary research for this report

• About Jon Peddie Research

Executive Summary

• What's in this report

Introduction

The quarter in general

• Q1'20
  • Good enough isn't

• Quarter-to-quarter changes
  • Attach rate
  • Market shares
  • Segments

• AIB price bands

Market Value

• Geographical distribution
  • Forecast

• Market value
  • Market value and forecast by segment
  • Market value and forecast by region
  • Memory size

AIB developments in the quarter

• Is ray tracing catching on?

• AMD's Radeon RX 5600 XT
  • Radeon RX 5600 XT gaming performance
  • Epilog

• Intel announces discrete GPU DG1 at CES

• What's your GPU doing when you're not gaming?

• Khronos extends and releases Vulkan 1.2 for GPU acceleration

• Khronos Vulkan Ray Tracing API announced
  • What do we think?

• DirectX 12 Ultimate
  • For further reading
  • What do we think?

• GeForce Now, now
  • What do we think?

• Ray tracing in next gen Xbox AND PS5
  • What do we think?

• Minecraft with Nvidia's ray tracing GPU and RTX
  • What do we think?

• 144Hz? Time to revisit FPS, PPI, and HDR
  • How to choose?
  • Conclusion

• Intel really respects AMD technology

• AMD expands their senior leadership to maintain their growth

Appendix

• GPUs, AIBs, and PCs
• Categorizations
• FLOPS vs FRAPS: cars & GPUs
• Why good enough isn't
• Production schedule and pipeline
• Sales channel
• Multi AIBs
• GPU-Compute
• Graphics boards
• AIB suppliers
• Glossary

Index

Table of Figures

• Figure 1: A typical graphics AIB
• Figure 2: JPR's area of interest-anything that influences a pixel
• Figure 3: Market share changes quarter-to-quarter, and year-to-year
• Figure 4: Shipments of desktop PCs compared to desktop AIBs over time
• Figure 5: Add-in board shipments over time
• Figure 6: AIB market shares
• Figure 7: Impact of other device choices to AIBs over time
• Figure 8: AIB shipments relative to desktop PCs
• Figure 9: Attach rate of AIBs in desktop PCS
• Figure 10: Attach rate over time and total shipments in millions of units
• Figure 11: Market share for AIBs over time and total unit shipments in millions
• Figure 12: Market share for Workstation AIBs over time and total unit shipments in millions
• Figure 13: Market share for High-end AIBs over time and total unit shipments in millions
• Figure 14: Market share for Midrange AIBs over time and total unit shipments in millions
• Figure 15: Market share for Low-end AIBs over time and total unit shipments in millions
• Figure 16: Segment change and total unit shipments in millions
• Figure 17: DX 12 Steam users by segment
• Figure 18: Low-end AIB ASP over time
• Figure 19: Midrange AIB ASP over time
• Figure 20: High-end AIB ASP over time
• Figure 21: Workstation AIB ASP over time
• Figure 22: Market value of segments over time
• Figure 23: Geographic distribution of sales for the quarter
• Figure 24: AIB overall forecast
• Figure 25: Market value forecast by AIB segment
• Figure 26: Market value of regions over time
• Figure 27: Market value by region
• Figure 28: Memory load of AIBs over time
• Figure 29: The take up of Nvidia RTX AIBs vs previous GTX AIBs
• Figure 30: AMD's XR 5600 XT
• Figure 31: AMD RX Radeon XT versus various Nvidia AIBs
• Figure 32: ATI Radeon HD 5600, circa 2009. (Source: Sapphire)
• Figure 33: Gregory Bryant holding a Tiger Lake mother board. (Source: Intel)
• Figure 34 Intel's CPU Core architecture roadmap. (Source: Intel)
• Figure 35: Intel Tiger Lake: the little chip the GPU, and the big one the CPU. (Source: Intel)
• Figure 36 Intel's DG1 development AIB designed primarily for ISV's (Source Videocardz)
• Figure 37: As many as 38 small 5K cameras are installed in a ring around the venue, capturing the entire field of play. They generate massive amounts of volumetric data-voxels. (Source: Intel)
• Figure 38: Obsolete data-this is as of 28 March
• Figure 39: Examples of COVID-19-related proteins as visualized by Folding@Home
• Figure 40: HLSL going into the compliers and out comes two sets of drivers (Source Khronos)
• Figure 41: Vulkan Ray Tracing acceleration structure hierarchy
• Figure 42: Building an acceleration structure and rendering on GPU
• Figure 43: Load balancing by building an acceleration structure across multiple CPUs
• Figure 44: Ray tracing pipeline flow diagram
• Figure 45: Ray queries flow diagram
• Figure 46: Although more flexible than the previous geometry pipeline, the mesh shader model is also much simpler (Source Microsoft)
• Figure 47: The Amplification Shader runs before the mesh shader and determines how many mesh shader thread groups are needed (Source Microsoft)
• Figure 48: Setup of a scene using texture-space shading (Source Microsoft)
• Figure 49: Nvidia has deployed 15 servers North America and Western Europe, and uses partners elsewhere in the world (Source Nvidia)
• Figure 50: Ray tracing for everyone: ray tracing has been a part of the DirectX API as DXR since March 2018. With the arrival of RDNA 2 and new consoles, developers will have common platform for ray tracing across devices.
• Figure 51: New physically based materials bring Minecraft to life. (Source: Nvidia)
• Figure 52: Showing the effects of DLSS on and off, better images with higher frame rate. (Source: Nvidia)
• Figure 53: Monitor size (left axis) vs PPI and M pixels (right side)
• Figure 54: GPU market segmentation
• Figure 55: Improvement in GFLOPS of GPUs over time
• Figure 56: Simplified AIB block diagram
• Figure 57: Simplified integrated GPU block diagram
• Figure 58: Analogies of a car's performance to a PC
• Figure 59: Design to manufacturing, to assemble, to consumer pipeline
• Figure 60: Sales channels for AIBs
• Figure 61: Approximately 73.8% of all graphics AIBs end up in gaming PCs

Table of Tables

• Table 1: AIB sub-segment price bands
• Table 2: Workstation AIB segment price bands
• Table 3: AMD test results with anti-lag
• Table 4: AMD benchmark testing
• Table 5: Raw test data and Pmark scores
• Table 6: Comparing Vulkan Ray Tracing and DXR
• Table 7: Sampling of popular and desirable monitors
• Table 8: Primary customer segmentation
• Table 9: Notebook classifications
• Table 10: Desktop classifications
• Table 11: GPU and AIB classifications
• Table 12: amount of time playing games
• Table 13: AIBs currently available in the market (Source: JPR)