A new report indicates Intel's latest Battlemage GPUs are a total failure and AMD's gaming graphics

AMD's share of the add-in graphics card market fell to a fairly pitiful 8% in the first quarter of 2025 according to Jon Peddie Research (JPR), a specialist in tracking PC hardware sales. Meanwhile, JPR puts Intel's graphics market share at essentially zero, with Nvidia hoovering up the remaining 92%. Ouch.

Before we all escalate the threat level to PC gaming to DEFCON 1 and panic, it should be noted that JPR's figures cover the period up to the end of March. AMD's new Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT were only released on March 6. So, that's only three and [[link]] a bit weeks of RDNA 4 sales in the figures.

In other words, we'll have to wait for the Q2 numbers to get a full picture of how much impact AMD's new GPUs have had. Indeed, we'll arguably have to wait even longer than [[link]] that, since it's the RX 9060 XT, which only went on sale yesterday, that's meant to be the real volume play for AMD and that won't have a substantial impact on market share figures until the Q3 data is out.

Overall, GPU sales were up 8.5% in Q1 2025 compared to Q4 2024. JPR says that Q1 is usually flat or down compared to the previous quarter, but that, "In Q1’25, AMD and Nvidia introduced new AIBs, which stimulated the market."

If we'll have to wait a little longer to see how the RX 9070 and 9060 GPUs fare for AMD, the verdict on Intel's Arc B570 and B580 GPUs is surely in and it not good news, not good news at all.

JPR reckons Intel's market share fell by 1.2% in the latest quarter, essentially putting it on 0% and not appearing in the data for Q1 2025. If there was already doubt over Intel's commitment to the add-in graphics card market, this apparent total failure of Intel's second-gen Battlemage generation of GPUs is extremely troubling.

Battlemage GPUs went on sale at the end of 2024. So, in theory Q1 2025 was a full quarter for sales of Intel's latest graphics hardware. Obviously sales of the B570 and B580 haven't actually been zero. But if JPR is to be believed, the volumes are so small as to effectively push Intel out of its data.

If even half a percent of sales were going to Intel, JPR would no doubt have included that in its data. So, we're talking less than one in 200 GPUs sales being Intel cards, and quite possibly an order of magnitude or more worse than that.

It really is a grim outlook for Intel graphics and puts rumours of more powerful Battlemage GPUs into context. With sales this low, is it remotely realistic to expect Intel to wheel out that purported Nvidia RTX 4070 / 5070 killer? It doesn't seem terribly plausible in the light of this latest data.

Still, the numbers we're really looking forward to will be Q3 2025, when both of AMD's new RDNA 4 GPUs will have had at least a full quarter on sale. That data probably [[link]] won't be out until the end of the year. So, check back in December and cross all your fingers and toes until then.

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