The economy may be suffering a slowdown, but you wouldn’t know that by looking at the GPU market. According to the latest figures compiled by Jon Peddie Research, more than 111 million GPUs were shipped in the third quarter of 2008, representing an annual increase of 22.5 percent and the largest quarter-to-quarter increase in six years at almost 18 percent.

Intel and AMD have been the main beneficiaries of this growth. The former jumped from 33.4 percent in the third quarter of 2007 to 49.4 percent in the third quarter of this year, whereas AMD now claims 20.6% of the overall GPU market from 18.1 percent in the previous quarter.

Meanwhile, Nvidia was the only major player that didn’t report any growth, instead seeing its market share drop from 31.4 percent last quarter to just 27.8 percent. This quarter’s picture is very different from how things looked just a year ago, when Nvidia had the lion’s share of the market at 36.4 percent followed by Intel at 30.3 percent. The company still has a larger portion of both the notebook and desktop the GPU market than its rival AMD, though it seems AMD is starting to catch up.