Jon Peddie Research (JPR) has released a follow-up to its recent GPU sales report, this time specifically targeting the graphics add-in-board market. As the GPU sales report includes AMD’s (NYSE: AMD) APUs and many new Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) CPUs which have GPU cores, the AIB report is a more specific barometer of the health of the video card market overall.

According to JPR’s report, sales of AIBs declined 17.5% quarter-over-quarter and 17.6% year-over-year. In comparison, last year’s quarter-over-quarter rate for the same period was 5.5%. This comes in the face of an overall PC market that’s improving quarter-over-quarter by 1.3%.

The attach rate to 36%, down from 44% last quarter. The record for attach rate remains at 63% during the first quarter of 2008.

Breaking down the sales numbers by vendor, Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) fared the worst in terms of decreases, taking a hit of 21%. AMD had a decline of 10.7%.

Despite having the bigger decline than AMD, Nvidia still remained the market leader holding 62% market share overall.

Not Just an Integrated Problem

It would be easy to blame the great GPU decline on the success and competitiveness of CPU-GPU integration. Both AMD and Intel’s offerings have substantially and consistently improved over the past few years, so much so that they are taking a bite out of the discrete graphics card market.

But for enthusiast gamers, the need for a discrete card will never go away. This is the market group that has the budget and willingness to spend on serious GPU horsepower. But there’s a problem: the discrete graphics cards that this group bought last year, or even the year before, are good enough for the majority of today’s games.

4K gaming, which has the potential to drive more GPU sales, is increasing fast but still in its infancy. Until affordable 4K displays hit the mass market, this market segment can’t mature from niche to mainstream. Also, another factor is that game developers generally try and build games for the Xbox One and Playstation first then port later to PC. This means that this generation of graphics cards are hardly pushed to their respective limits. Until 4K gaming becomes mainstream, or developers start to create games that push these latest graphics cards, it will be hard for GPU vendors to convince gamers they need a new graphics card.

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Today’s announcement regarding Mantle is probably the biggest announcement AMD has made around Mantle since they talked about it at GDC in March. Back then, AMD was talking a lot about Mantle’s capabilities and games with Mantle, but they didn’t talk about the expansion of the program much, even though that was probably their most captive audience. In fact, making today’s announcement about the closed beta should probably have been done at GDC as that would have been their target audience and they could have even spoken directly with most of the interested developers. Alas, it was probably not ready yet for a beta release and they waited until today to make the announcement. Either way, you can now head over to an actual beta page for Mantle and access the NDA SDK if you are given access by AMD. In all honesty, Mantle has technically already been a closed-beta program for quite some time and this announcement doesn’t really seem to change much other than create a public page.

You still have to email mantleaccess [at] amd [dot] com in order to even get access to the page and/or SDK and you have to supply them with the following info:

• Name of company
• Name and email of contact point for Mantle access
• Game title(s) or codenames for which you are interested to evaluate Mantle for
• Reasons for requesting Mantle access

Once you’ve emailed them at that email address with that info you MIGHT get access to Mantle and you COULD start developing with Mantle, but there simply aren’t any guarantees since AMD is still selecting who they do and don’t want using Mantle. AMD claims that they’ve already got 40 different developers using Mantle  with this new beta program and are looking to expand it further, even though we don’t exactly know how many developers AMD can really support simultaneously and still do it well. I want Mantle to be successful and to be broadly accepted, but in the end it is still a proprietary graphics API which means it will only work on AMD’s GCN cores and nobody else’s and I’m not sure how many developers are going to want to develop games for both Mantle and DirectX 12.

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