Beancounters at Jon Peddie Research have penned a report which claims that combined discrete and integrated GPU shipments in Q4 2012 dropped 8.2 per cent sequentially and 11.5 per cent on a year-to-year basis.

As you would expect they blame the popularity of tablets and the persistent recession, although quite how that works as the last I saw it was impossible to plug in a tablet instead of a graphics card. What is more likely it is the usual rubbish about how the world is buying tablets instead of PCs, rather than the more obvious fact that no one upgrades their PC in a recession. Anyway JPR has revised its compound annual growth rate for PC graphics from 2012 to 2016 to 3.2 per cent, with the total shipments of graphics chips in 2016 expected to be 549 million units.

Each of the major players will be upset with the results. Intel’s shipments dropped the least quarter-to-quarter at just 2.9 per cent, while AMD slipped 13.6 per cent and Nvidia was down 16.7 per cent. In terms of market share Intel held on to its dominant position and actually gained 3.4 per cent to 63.4 per cent at the expense of AMD dripped to 19.7 per cent and Nvidia fell to 16.9 per cent.

Jon Peddie notes that the numbers suggest more and more users are finding that embedded graphics, such as those found in Intel's and AMD's processors, are "good enough." This is indicative of the general falling standards in the world where rubbish is hyped to the skies at the expense of good stuff. We have dubbed this the “Apple Bieber” factor.