Just a few days before the official release of Windows Vista, which many consider an important factor to convince PC users to upgrade to better graphics hardware, a market research firm says that graphics cards sales have slowed significantly in the first three quarters of the year. According to Jon Peddie Research (JPR), third quarter graphics boards revenues came in at about $4.97 billion, which translates into a 4.4% decline over Q2 and a 12.2% decline over Q3 2005. For comparison, graphics add-in-card sales hit a high of $5.88 billion in Q1 of this year. JPR analyst Alex Herrera attributed decreased sales to the fact that both Nvidia and AMD/ATI were at the "tale-end" of the graphics chip generation in Q3 and needed to knock down prices in order to clear out their inventory. JPR estimates that 21.8 million graphics boards were sold in Q3 - a 10.6% increase sequentially and a 7.7% increase over the same period the previous year. More at TG Daily
