That's more like it

There was almost a triumphal tone to the latest global graphics market report from market researcher Jon Peddie Research (JPR), as record 21.2 percent quarter-on-quarter growth - the best in nine years - lead to the first yearly improvement since things all went horribly wrong.

"A total of 119.45 million units were shipped in the third quarter, exceeding the record 111 million units that shipped in Q3, 2008," said Dr. Jon Peddie, president of JPR. "So the market has caught up with, and exceeded, last year's highs. The crash of fall 2008 is now behind us."

Among the vendors, AMD continues to benefit from its own strong GPU offering and NVIDIA's apparent focus elsewhere on things like embedded and high-performance chips. Intel also took share from NVIDIA, thanks in part to the continued popularity of netbooks.

"Integrated graphics in notebooks, which includes the popular netbooks, increased 27% over Q2 - a great gain but less than discrete," said Peddie. "Netbooks will remain popular but they will not have the high market share they had during the recession when they were just introduced. Rather, consumers are expected to "buy up" in the next quarter.

"The channel is full and the products in it will have to be sold off before the OEMs and their resellers take a chance of seeing the channel becoming overstuffed. That suggests that while Q4 is typically a good quarter for PCs, the quarter-to-quarter growth in Q4 may not be as robust as Q3. Graphics are a great leading indicator - the graphics go in before the PC is built or shipped."

Here's a table from JPR, showing the full vendor market share breakdown for the quarter and both quarterly and annual growth. We're not sure about the maths for the total yr-yr growth figure - our trusty Casio makes 119.45 a 7.6 percent improvement on 111, but that's still a great figure.

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