ATI's Q3 2004 lead over arch-rival Nvidia was eroded during Q4, the latest figures from market watcher Mercury Research suggest.

During the quarter, Nvidia added three percentage points to its share of the overall graphics chip market, taking it to 18 per cent, while ATI stuck at 27 per cent, its share in Q3, as did all the lesser players combined. Intel continued to dominate the arena with almost 40 per cent of the market.

The desktop chip sector's discrete segment saw Nvidia nudge back towards its Q2 share of 58 per cent from Q3's low 42 per cent share. During Q4 it accounted for 46 per cent of the market. ATI's still in the lead, but its share slipped from 55 per cent in Q3 to 51 per cent in Q4.

Nvidia took 25 per cent of the standalone notebook chip market in Q4, up from Q2's 22 per cent, while ATI's share slid slightly to 69 per cent from 72 per cent.

Combined discrete graphics chip sales were up 13 per cent on Q3.

In the integrated mobile market, in which Nvidia is not a player, ATI's share fell seven percentage points to 19 per cent, as Intel grabbed 11 more percentage points to come out of Q4 with 72 per cent of the market. That's likely to increase further now that its Graphics Accelerator 900-enabled 915GM, 915GML and 915GMS chipsets, part of its second-generation Centrino platform. ®

Related stories

ATI launches Mobility Radeon X700
PCI Express push ATI sales up
Nvidia apes ATI to revive mid-1990s AGP feature
Nvidia to unveil 'nForce for Intel' Q1 05
Q3 integrated graphics chip shipments soar
ATI rolls out X300, X800 mobile GPUs
ATI to spend $10m on Korean R&D plant
Nvidia signs Intel bus licence deal
Nvidia ships mobile GeForce 6800
Nvidia beats Street with Q3 sales hike
ATI tapes out 90nm R5xx chip
ATI trounces Nvidia in desktop, mobile, integrated markets