In its quarterly report of the GPU market, graphics and multimedia research firm Jon Peddie Research highlighted a swift market share swing among the two largest players.
According to their data, AMD owned a 35 percent market share in the fourth quarter of 2013. A year later, that figure dropped to just 24 percent - an 11 percent dip year-over-year. Nvidia, meanwhile, saw its market share rise from 64.9 percent to 76 percent during the same time period, good for an increase of 11.1 percent.
The numbers appear to be a reflection of the good fortune that Nvidia has enjoyed as of late, largely from the release of its Maxwell GPUs. Earlier this month, the GPU maker reported quarterly earnings that topped Wall Street expectations and further reiterated the fact that PC gaming is standing strong.
That's not to say that it's been all rainbows and unicorns for Nvidia as of late as they've dealt with some negative press over the past several weeks.
Last month, it came to be known that the GTX 970 had a memory performance issue that many believe the company failed to mention until after the fact. And just a week or so ago, Nvidia confirmed they had removed the overclocking feature in GeForce 900M GPUs. The feature was supposedly never meant to be enabled yet after much backlash, Nvidia backtracked and promised to restore overclocking in its next driver update.
AMD, meanwhile, is looking to the future with a recent preview of its next generation Carrizo APU, codenamed Excavator. Compared to existing Kaveri silicon, users can expect big energy-efficiency gains thanks largely to a CPU module that is 23 percent smaller in area than Steamroller. The smaller size doesn't mean fewer transistors, however, as Carrizo contains 3.1 billion of them.
As TechPowerUp notes, each Excavator core features two x86 64-bit CPU cores which is similar to AMD's past three core generations. All said and done, we can expect power consumption to be a whopping 40 percent less than Steamroller (and double-digit battery life improvements) which will make it ideal in both notebook and tablet use.