Gaming GPU and Hardware Sales: The 2026 Statistics

Gaming hardware in 2026 is a market of extremes: Nvidia’s grip on discrete graphics has never been tighter, Nintendo’s Switch 2 is racing ahead of every console launch on record, and a global memory shortage is pushing PC prices up even as unit shipments slide. This page pulls together the latest verified figures from Jon Peddie Research, Newzoo, IDC, Counterpoint, Omdia, Valve and platform holders’ own filings to give journalists a single, current reference. Free to use with a link back to ShaneTheGamer as the source.

Key Takeaways for Journalists

• Nvidia holds ~94% of the discrete add-in-board GPU market as of Q4 2025 — its highest share on record — with AMD at 5-6% and Intel below 1%, per Jon Peddie Research.
• ~44 million add-in-board GPUs shipped in 2025, a sharp rebound driven mainly by Nvidia’s RTX 50-series (Blackwell) launch, according to Jon Peddie Research.
• The global games market passed $200 billion for the first time, closing 2025 at $201.6 billion, according to Newzoo.
• PS5 cumulative sell-in reached ~93.7 million units by the fiscal year ended March 31, 2026, per Sony’s filings — crossing 95.3 million by mid-2026.
• Switch 2 shipped 23.68 million units by June 30, 2026, the biggest hardware launch in Nintendo history and roughly 8 million units ahead of the PS5 at the same lifecycle point.
• A laptop GPU topped the Steam chart for the first time in June 2026 — the RTX 4060 Laptop GPU — a milestone for portable PC gaming.
• PC gaming hardware sales hit a record ~$44.5 billion in 2025, up around 35% year-over-year, per Jon Peddie Research.
• IDC expects global PC shipments to fall ~11.3% in 2026, driven by DRAM and NAND shortages tied to the AI infrastructure buildout.
• Gaming-monitor shipments jumped ~50% in 2025 to about 41 million units, with Omdia projecting 43 million in 2026.
• Nvidia’s Gaming segment posted a record $16.0 billion in fiscal 2026, up 41% year-over-year even as it moved the business up-market.

Nvidia’s Grip on the Discrete GPU Market

The single most important number in PC gaming hardware right now is Nvidia’s share of the discrete add-in-board (AIB) market. NVIDIA expanded its dominance with a 94% market share, gaining 2.1 points from Q1, while AMD fell to 6% and Intel remained below 1%. That reading, from Jon Peddie Research’s mid-2025 report, hardened by the fourth quarter into what JPR calls the highest share on record.

The trajectory through 2025 was almost linear. Nvidia entered the year with 92% of AIB shipments in Q1, held or grew that share through Q2 and Q3, and exited at 94% in Q4. The engine behind that was Blackwell: NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 50 Blackwell series continued to drive sales, while AMD’s RDNA 4-based RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 entered the market with limited share gains.

By early 2026 the picture was, if anything, more lopsided. In discrete consumer GPUs (add-in boards), Nvidia held 90% of shipments in Q1 2026 per Jon Peddie Research, with AMD at 8% and Intel at 1%. The apparent dip from Q4’s 94% reflects normal quarterly noise and a slight AMD rebound rather than a structural shift — AMD’s product launches simply have not been enough to reclaim ground against Nvidia’s installed base.

It is worth separating two very different measures. The 90-94% figures describe AIB shipment share — units leaving manufacturers for OEMs and retail. The data covers add-in boards shipped to OEMs and the retail channel — units leaving manufacturer hands, not point-of-sale purchases — a distinction that matters because stockpiling by OEMs anticipating price hikes may inflate some quarters. Installed-base share, tracked by Valve, tells a steadier story that we cover further down.

Add-In-Board Shipments and the 2026 Squeeze

Unit volumes rebounded sharply in 2025 before hitting headwinds. Jon Peddie Research’s Q2 2025 report showed a sharp rebound in global AIB shipments, with the market reaching 11.6 million units — a 27% increase compared to the first quarter and 5.7% above the 10-year seasonal average. Momentum carried into the second half: the global PC-based graphics add-in board market reached 12.0 million units in Q3’25, and desktop PC CPU shipments increased to 19.2 million units.

That said, JPR flagged distortion from panic buying. Q2 AIB shipments were unusually high, which JPR thinks was due to panic buying because of the pending tariff, which sapped some sales away from Q3. The firm’s longer forecast is cautious: the 2024-to-2029 CAGR for AIBs is -0.7%, which has been the trend.

Into 2026, the market cooled. Overall GPU shipments declined 9.9% quarter-over-quarter, and desktop graphics add-in board shipments decreased 14.8%. The pressure is coming from component costs rather than demand collapse — the same memory crunch reshaping the whole PC industry.

For context on the broader GPU ecosystem including integrated graphics, JPR data points to enormous scale: GPU shipments reached 70 million units in the quarter, with discrete GPUs projected to achieve 22% penetration in the PC market as the overall GPU installed base approaches 3 billion units by 2026.

The Steam Hardware Survey: An Installed Base That Upgrades Slowly

Sales share and installed base are very different things, and Valve’s monthly Steam Hardware Survey is the closest thing PC gaming has to a census. Its defining theme in 2026 is longevity. The four-year-old RTX 3060 was still the single most common GPU at 3.99% in April 2026, ahead of the RTX 4060 Laptop GPU at 3.78% and the RTX 3050 at 3.04%, and even the newer RTX 5070 only climbed to 2.86%.

By mid-year, a genuine milestone arrived. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU became the single most common graphics card in the June 2026 Steam Hardware Survey, appearing in 3.81% of surveyed systems — edging past the desktop RTX 3060 at 3.73% for the first time. When a laptop GPU claims the top spot, it reflects handheld gaming PCs, ultraportable laptops and portable systems claiming a growing share of real-world gaming time.

On vendor share, Steam’s installed-base numbers are far less lopsided than shipment share. Nvidia GPUs — spanning desktop, laptop and integrated silicon reported in the survey — held 72.72% of the July 2026 sample, with AMD at 18.71% and Intel at 8.16%. AMD’s Radeon presence has genuinely improved in visibility: AMD’s Radeon share climbed from roughly 16.4% at the start of 2025 to 19.1% by late spring 2026, before settling back to 18.71% in July.

The RTX 50-series is finally showing up in meaningful numbers, though it remains a minority. Combined, the RTX 50 lineup now represents 13.41% of all surveyed systems, with desktop GPUs accounting for 10.8% of that figure. Display habits move just as slowly: 1920×1080 holds 52.21% of primary displays, 2560×1440 sits at 21.41% and is climbing, and 4K reached only 5.09%. On the CPU side, AMD sat at 45.99% of Windows gaming CPUs on Steam in June with Intel at 54.01%, narrowing the gap to under nine points — a figure that would have been unthinkable five years ago.

Console Hardware: Switch 2 Sets the Pace

Nintendo’s new hybrid redefined launch expectations. Nintendo reported that the Switch 2 had shipped 23.68 million units worldwide as of June 30, 2026, up from 19.86 million at the close of fiscal year 2026 (March 31, 2026). It was the biggest hardware launch in Nintendo history, with 3.5 million units sold in the first four days on sale in June 2025 — ahead of the original Switch, the Wii, and every PlayStation and Xbox debut on record.

The lifecycle comparisons are striking. Nintendo’s pace runs 45 percent ahead of the original Switch over a comparable window, and roughly eight million units ahead of where the PS5 stood at the same point in its lifecycle. Nintendo has also kept its own guidance conservative: the forecast for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2027 has the Switch 2 at 16.50 million units shipped and the original Switch at 2.00 million.

Sony’s PS5 remains far ahead on a lifetime basis and continues its steady climb. Cumulative PS5 sell-in reached 93.7 million units by the fiscal year ended March 31, 2026. By the following quarter, 1.6 million PS5 units were shipped in the quarter, bringing the lifetime total to 95.3 million units. Near-term momentum, however, has shifted: PS5 shipments in the June 2026 quarter ran 36% below the same quarter a year earlier.

Microsoft, by contrast, no longer discloses console unit sales at all, forcing analysts to rely on estimates. By VGChartz estimates, the Xbox Series X|S reached lifetime sales of 35.05 million units by June 2026. Sony’s engagement figures underline that the platform’s value has shifted toward services: PlayStation monthly active users reached 125 million accounts in June, up 2% year-on-year. For deeper platform history, see our Nintendo Switch sales analysis.

Nvidia’s Gaming Revenue and the Move Up-Market

Even as data center revenue dwarfs everything else at Nvidia, its Gaming business is at record levels. Fourth-quarter Gaming revenue was $3.7 billion, up 47% from a year ago on strong Blackwell demand, and full-year revenue rose 41% to a record $16.0 billion. Earlier in the cycle, first-quarter Gaming revenue was a record $3.8 billion, up 48% from the previous quarter and up 42% from a year ago.

The strategy behind those numbers is explicit: prioritise average selling price over volume. With the RTX 5090 launching above $2,000 MSRP, Nvidia is explicitly moving Gaming up-market, prioritizing ASP expansion over unit volume — the right strategy for a company that generates roughly $39 billion per quarter from data centers and no longer needs Gaming to carry the P&L.

Nvidia also brought Blackwell to mainstream price points. It announced the GeForce RTX 5070 and RTX 5060, bringing Blackwell graphics to gamers at prices starting from $299 for desktops and $1,099 for laptops. A notable reporting change complicates future tracking: from fiscal 2027, standalone GeForce RTX gaming revenue is no longer separately listed and is now integrated under an “Edge Computing” segment; the last standalone gaming figure was Q4 2025’s $3.7 billion.

The Memory Shortage Reshaping PC Gaming Hardware

The dominant macro story of 2026 is component cost. IDC forecasts global PC shipments will decline 11.3% for full-year 2026, with conditions expected to worsen through Q4, when year-over-year declines could reach 20% — driven primarily by a persistent memory shortage. That said, total market value is holding up: while unit shipments are expected to decline significantly year-over-year, higher average selling prices are projected to push total market value slightly upward.

Newzoo ties the crunch directly to AI infrastructure competing for the same supply. Memory costs are affecting every platform, driven by AI infrastructure buildout competing for the same DRAM and NAND supply as consumer hardware. The first quarter of 2026 actually grew on pull-forward buying: global PC shipments grew 3.2% YoY in Q1 2026 to reach 63.3 million units, according to Counterpoint Research.

The result is a bifurcating gaming hardware market. PC gaming hardware sales hit $44.5 billion in 2025 — a record 35% jump from $33 billion the year before — and the segment is holding above $40 billion annually through 2028, per Jon Peddie Research. High-end buyers keep spending while the mainstream gets squeezed, a pattern that will define pricing narratives all year.

Gaming Monitors and the Wider Peripheral Market

Displays were one of the standout growth stories of 2025. Global shipments of computer monitors reached 133.4 million units in 2025 — 4.3% more than the previous year — according to Omdia. Gaming panels drove that recovery: their sales jumped by 50.2% compared to the previous year, amounting to about 41 million units, or 31.1% of total shipments.

The momentum has been remarkably durable. As of the last quarter of 2025, shipments of gaming monitors had grown for eleven consecutive quarters, with October-December showing the maximum result in the entire history of Omdia observations. Looking ahead, Omdia forecasts that in 2026 the supply of gaming monitors will reach 43 million units.

The premium end is where product innovation is concentrated. Dual-mode gaming monitors — which let users switch between high resolution such as 4K at 240 Hz and maximum refresh rates like 1080p at 480 Hz — are gaining popularity, with Omdia estimating double-digit percentage shipment growth for such devices in 2026. On the systems side, ASUS has ridden the notebook refresh cycle hard: it recorded the most explosive YoY growth, surging by an impressive 20% to reach 4.8 million units in Q1 2026.

The Global Games Market Context

Hardware sits inside a software and services market that just crossed a symbolic threshold. The global games market passed $200 billion in revenue for the first time in 2025, closing at $201.6 billion, according to Newzoo. Growth was led, notably, by the PC platform: PC delivered the strongest growth rate of 12% year-over-year, while console revenues grew 2.8% and mobile grew 10.7%.

Player numbers continue to expand even as spending patterns shift. Newzoo earlier projected a global player base reaching 3.6 billion (+4.4% year on year), of which 936 million would be PC players, 645 million console players, and 3 billion mobile players. Console strength in 2025 was tied directly to new hardware: the console segment was expected to grow fastest at 5.5% to $45.9 billion, growth Newzoo attributes to the launch of the Nintendo Switch 2 and a general rise in console prices.

Regionally, the money remains concentrated. China ($49.8 billion) and the USA ($49.6 billion) together account for 50% of all consumer spending on games. The one major caveat for hardware analysts: Newzoo’s headline figures exclude hardware sales, so console and GPU unit data must be sourced separately from the platform holders and firms like Jon Peddie Research. For the money side of competition, see our esports earnings research.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Nvidia’s GPU market share in 2026?

Nvidia reached roughly 94% of the discrete add-in-board GPU market in Q4 2025 — its highest on record — with AMD around 5-6% and Intel below 1%, per Jon Peddie Research. On Steam’s installed-base survey, Nvidia held about 72.7% of all surveyed GPUs in July 2026.

How many PS5 and Switch 2 units have been sold?

Sony reported cumulative PS5 sell-in of about 93.7 million units by March 31, 2026, rising to 95.3 million by mid-2026. Nintendo’s Switch 2 reached 23.68 million units shipped by June 30, 2026, roughly 8 million ahead of the PS5 at the equivalent lifecycle point.

How big is the PC gaming hardware market?

PC gaming hardware sales hit a record ~$44.5 billion in 2025, up about 35% year-over-year according to Jon Peddie Research, and the segment is expected to hold above $40 billion annually through 2028 despite falling unit shipments.

Why are gaming PC and GPU prices rising in 2026?

A severe DRAM and NAND memory shortage — driven by AI infrastructure competing for the same supply — is pushing prices up. IDC expects global PC shipments to fall about 11.3% in 2026, even as higher average selling prices lift total market value.

What was the top GPU on Steam in 2026?

In June 2026 the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU became the single most common card at 3.81%, edging past the desktop RTX 3060 at 3.73% — the first time a laptop GPU has topped Valve’s chart.

Methodology & Sourcing

This page compiles figures from primary corporate filings (Sony, Nintendo and Nvidia quarterly results) and specialist market-research firms (Jon Peddie Research for GPU shipment share and AIB volumes, IDC and Counterpoint for PC shipments, Omdia for monitors, and Newzoo for overall games-market revenue), plus Valve’s Steam Hardware Survey for installed-base data. Where estimates diverged between firms, we cross-referenced multiple sources and labelled projections and estimates as such. Readers should note key caveats: shipment share (units leaving factories) differs from installed-base share (what gamers actually run); Xbox no longer reports console units, so any Xbox total is an industry estimate; Nvidia has folded standalone gaming revenue into an “Edge Computing” segment from fiscal 2027; and Newzoo’s market totals exclude hardware sales. All figures were the latest available as of publication and are subject to revision as firms update their data.

Sources

• Jon Peddie Research — quarterly Add-in Board and GPU market reports (2025-2026)
• Valve — Steam Hardware Survey (April-July 2026)
• Newzoo — Global Games Market Report and quarterly updates (2025-2026)
• IDC — Worldwide Personal Computing Device Forecast (2026)
• Counterpoint Research — Global PC Shipments, Q1 2026
• Omdia — Computer Monitor and Gaming Monitor shipment data (2025-2026)
• Sony Group Corporation — quarterly financial results and supplemental data (FY2026)
• Nintendo Co., Ltd. — FY2026 and Q1 FY2027 investor relations results
• NVIDIA Corporation — Q4 FY2026 and Q1 FY2027 financial results
• VGChartz — worldwide hardware estimates (2026)

Spotted a newer figure or an error? Contact the ShaneTheGamer desk and we will update this page.