Gaming GPU and Hardware Sales Statistics (2018-2026)

Gaming hardware entered 2026 in a state of stark contradiction: record dollar sales sitting on top of a shrinking, increasingly monopolised graphics-card market, all while a new console generation ramps and older GPUs refuse to retire. This reference page collects the most-cited GPU, PC and console hardware sales figures from Jon Peddie Research, Valve, Sony, Nintendo, VGChartz and others so reporters can quote verified numbers rather than guesses. Free to use with a link back to ShaneTheGamer as the source.

Key Takeaways for Journalists

• Nvidia holds ~94% of the discrete graphics-card market as of Q4 2025 — its highest share on record, according to Jon Peddie Research.
• 44.28 million add-in-board GPUs shipped in calendar 2025, up from 34.7 million in 2024 — the second-highest total this decade, per JPR.
• AMD’s card share fell to 5% and Intel held ~1% in Q4 2025, leaving the consumer dGPU market effectively a one-vendor category.
• The AIB market is projected to decline ~10% in 2026, squeezed by high memory prices, tariffs and stronger integrated graphics (JPR).
• PS5 passed 93 million units by March 2026 and the Nintendo Switch 2 shipped 19.86 million in its first fiscal year (Sony, Nintendo).
• The four-year-old RTX 3060 is still Steam’s most common GPU at ~3.99–4.15% in April 2026, underscoring how slowly gamers upgrade (Valve).
• PC gaming hardware sales reached ~$44.5 billion in 2025, a large jump year-over-year driven by the RTX 50 launch (Jon Peddie Research, via industry compilations).

The Discrete GPU Market: Record Volumes, Record Concentration

The headline story of 2025-2026 is consolidation. Across the wider games industry, few segments have concentrated as fast as add-in-board (AIB) graphics cards. According to Jon Peddie Research, the industry shipped 44.28 million graphics cards in calendar 2025, up from 34.7 million units in 2024, mainly because Nvidia released its GeForce RTX 50-series graphics processors based on the Blackwell architecture. That makes 2025 the second-highest shipment year of the decade despite widespread affordability complaints.

Market share tells a harsher story for Nvidia’s rivals. Nvidia dominated the market throughout the whole of 2025 as it entered the year with a 92% share in Q1 and exited the year with a 94% share in Q4 (gaining 1.6% in the fourth quarter alone). Meanwhile AMD’s GPU shipment market share dropped to 5% from 7% in the previous quarter and 15% in the same period the year before, and Intel’s market share for discrete Arc GPUs remained flat at 1%.

The quarter-by-quarter path was not a straight line. AIB shipments swung sharply through 2025: AIB shipments reached 9.2 million units during Q1 2025, then rebounded as the market reached 11.6 million units, a 27% increase compared to the first quarter in Q2 — a jump JPR attributed to buyers rushing ahead of expected tariff-driven price rises. Shipments peaked in Q3 before the AIB GPU market sold 11.5 million units in the final quarter of 2025, a reduction of half a million units from Q3, but a significant 36% increase compared to 8.45 million units in the final quarter of 2024.

Why 2026 Is Expected to Contract

Even as unit totals set records, the analysts who track this market are unusually gloomy about the year ahead. Due to constrained supply of GPUs, high GDDR memory prices, and geopolitical uncertainties, the market of graphics cards for desktops will decline by 10% year-over-year, according to Jon Peddie Research. The firm’s president, Dr. Jon Peddie, framed the pressure bluntly: “The AIB market, largely supported by gamers, is being squeezed from the bottom by powerful new notebooks and CPU integrated graphics, and from the high end by rising pricing due to competition (supply and demand), memory prices, and Trump administration tariffs that bounce around.”

Two structural forces sit underneath the forecast. First, the AI boom is consuming the same memory supply that gaming cards need, driving up GDDR6 and GDDR7 costs. Second, discrete cards are losing their must-have status in mainstream desktops. The desktop AIB attach rate fell to 55%, down 12.3% from the prior quarter in Q4 2025 — meaning fewer than half of the new desktop PCs shipped that quarter included a standalone graphics card. The result is a market where dollar value can rise while the number of gamers actually buying cards shrinks.

AMD’s launch metrics illustrate the paradox of a “successful” product that still loses share. The company said its Radeon RX 9070 XT sold strongly at launch, yet as Nvidia was gaining market share throughout 2025, while AMD was losing it, the company’s unit shipments also dropped from 0.74 million in the first quarter to 0.57 million units in the fourth quarter. For context, that Q4 figure was described as the lowest quarterly result for AMD and its ATI predecessor on record.

What Gamers Actually Own: The Steam Hardware Survey

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 most striking finding in 2026 is longevity. The RTX 3060 retakes the top GPU slot at 3.99%, which is exactly where it’s been for most of the past year. A parallel report put it slightly higher, noting the card holds a 4.15% share, maintaining a narrow lead over the GeForce RTX 4060, which follows at 4.05%.

The RTX 50 series — despite driving JPR’s record shipment totals — is filtering into the installed base slowly. As of April 2026, the 5070 sits at 2.86%, the 5060 at 2.57%, the 5060 Ti at 1.81%, the 5070 Ti at 1.62%, the 5080 at 1.37%, and the 5090 at 0.41%. The clearest sign of generational change is memory capacity: the 16 GB VRAM tier reached 23.51%, up another 1.98 percentage points from March, closing in on the long-dominant 8 GB tier.

The survey also captures Nvidia’s platform lock-in beyond raw silicon. When the shares of the RTX 20, 30, 40, and 50 series are combined, they account for nearly 60% of all Steam users. The persistence of five-year-old Ampere cards — kept viable by upscaling technologies like DLSS — is a major reason the upgrade cycle has lengthened and why a discrete-card market can shrink even as the player base grows.

Console Hardware: A New Generation Ramps

The console side of the hardware market pivoted into a new generation in 2025-2026. On the incumbent side, Sony reported over 93 million PS5 units by March 30, 2026, up from 74.9 million at the end of December 2024. That keeps the PS5 comfortably ahead of its competitors in current-generation home-console shipments.

Nintendo’s successor launched to record numbers. Nintendo said the Switch 2 sold 3.5 million units in its first three days on sale, calling it the fastest-selling console in the company’s history. Over its first fiscal year, the Switch 2 shipped 19.86 million units in its first fiscal year (April 2025 to March 2026), exceeding Nintendo’s ~19 million guidance. Retail trackers noted the momentum was historic: in its US launch month of June 2025, the Switch 2 recorded 1.6 million units, the highest single-month US hardware total Circana has ever logged.

Microsoft, by contrast, has stepped back from unit disclosure entirely. Microsoft has stopped publishing Xbox Series X|S unit figures, meaning any lifetime total is a third-party estimate. Regulatory filings and trackers such as VGChartz and Circana are now the primary basis for Xbox comparisons — a caveat journalists should flag whenever citing an Xbox sales number. Pricing also shifted across the board in 2026: Switch 2 launched at $449.99 in the US and rose to $499.99 on September 1, 2026, Sony raised the PS5 disc edition to $649.99 and the PS5 Pro to $899.99 in April 2026, and Xbox Series X remains at $499.99 and Series S at $299.99.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Nvidia’s gaming GPU market share in 2026?

According to Jon Peddie Research, Nvidia reached roughly 94% of the discrete add-in-board graphics-card market in Q4 2025 — its highest share on record — with AMD at 5% and Intel at about 1%.

How many graphics cards were sold in 2025?

The industry shipped about 44.28 million desktop add-in-board GPUs in calendar 2025, up from 34.7 million in 2024, driven mainly by Nvidia’s RTX 50-series (Blackwell) launch, per Jon Peddie Research.

Is the GPU market expected to grow or shrink in 2026?

Jon Peddie Research projects the PC and AIB graphics-card market will decline by roughly 10% in 2026, citing high memory prices, tariffs and increasingly capable integrated graphics.

What is the most popular gaming GPU in 2026?

Valve’s Steam Hardware Survey shows the four-year-old Nvidia RTX 3060 as the single most common GPU in April 2026, at around 3.99–4.15% of users, ahead of the RTX 4060 Laptop GPU.

How many PS5 and Switch 2 units have been sold?

Sony reported over 93 million PS5 units shipped by March 30, 2026, while Nintendo shipped 19.86 million Switch 2 units in its first fiscal year through March 31, 2026.

Methodology & Sourcing

Figures on this page were compiled from primary analyst reports and company disclosures published between mid-2025 and mid-2026, and cross-checked across multiple outlets where numbers diverged. GPU shipment and market-share data come from Jon Peddie Research’s quarterly Market Watch and AIB reports (as reported by JPR and relayed via trade press such as Tom’s Hardware, TechPowerUp and VideoCardz). Installed-base figures come from Valve’s Steam Hardware Survey, which samples opted-in users and can shift month-to-month due to sampling anomalies — the February–March 2026 volatility is a documented example. Console shipment totals for PS5 and Switch 2 are official manufacturer figures from Sony and Nintendo; Xbox totals are third-party estimates (VGChartz/Circana) because Microsoft no longer discloses unit sales. All 2026 outlooks are labelled as projections or estimates. Note that JPR’s shipment counts include some Nvidia GPUs bought for AI and professional workloads, not gaming alone, so the “gaming-only” market is somewhat smaller than headline AIB totals.

Sources

• Jon Peddie Research — Quarterly Market Watch & AIB GPU Market Reports (Q1–Q4 2025, 2026)
• Tom’s Hardware — GPU market share and shipment coverage (2026)
• TechPowerUp — JPR dGPU update reporting (2025-2026)
• VideoCardz — Q2/Q4 2025 AIB shipment reports (2025-2026)
• PCWorld / KitGuru / TweakTown — Q4 2025 GPU market analysis (2026)
• Valve — Steam Hardware & Software Survey (March–June 2026)
• The FPS Review / Guru3D — Steam survey trend analysis (2026)
• Sony Interactive Entertainment — PS5 cumulative shipment disclosures (2026)
• Nintendo — FY2026 investor relations sales data (2026)
• VGChartz & Circana / Mat Piscatella — console hardware estimates (2025-2026)

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