Mercury Research just released desktop market share data for the last quarter and surprisingly Q1 2009 is better than Q4 2008. This is the first time in the last few years that Q1 was better than Q4 last year.

This is certainly not an ordinary year, as people were very scared for their livelihoods, homes and jobs in Q4 2008, and somehow this market confidence started to recover in Q1 2009.

This helped Nvidia to have 3.8 percent better desktop sales in Q1 09 compared to Q4 2008. Overall, Nvidia gained 0.3 percent of market share while the same document claims that ATI lost over one percent of the desktop market share.

It overall discrete market that includes desktop and mobile, Nvidia increased by nearly 3 percent getting to total market share of 66percent. The rest should be in ATI hands, or most of it, since Intel doesn’t have a discrete product yet.

In desktop only, Nvidia had a 5.4 percent gain over Q4 2008 results, getting to a market share of 67 percent. We will try to get more details but Q1 looks like a good quarter for Nvidia and this actually reflects what Nvidia partners have told us, that Q1 2009 sales were much better than Q4 2009.