Workstation GPUs: PC gaming’s new enemy

All three PC GPU makers now look like leaning tougher into AI-specific graphics playing cards, straining a decent PC graphics market even additional.

A number of years in the past, PC gaming was seen as an enormous development driver for the silicon business, fans, and PC makers alike. Now, the meteoric rise of AI is luring {hardware} makers away from customers, and we’re seeing much more penalties in consequence.

This week, AMD launched the Radeon AI Pro R9700 graphics card for AI workstations, alongside the Radeon AI Pro R9700S and Pro R9600D for rack computing. Intel is reportedly launching the Arc Pro B70 and Arc Pro B65 this month, most certainly particularly for working LLMs. And Nvidia is projected to presumably skip 2026 totally for a launch of shopper GPUs, concentrating on promoting complete methods like Vera Rubin fairly than a shopper Rubin-based PC graphics card.

All of that GPU silicon might have landed on shopper PCs — and doubtless would have, a number of years in the past. Now, we noticed GPU shipments fall late final 12 months due to AI hyperscalers. Now workstations have joined the gang, beating up on the PC.

The comparatively small variety of workstations offered seemingly signifies that shifting the graphics silicon to workstations and datacenters may not have an infinite influence on PC GPU gross sales. But the traumatized PC market is weathering shortages of RAM and SSDs, alongside potential scarcity of Intel CPUs and a graphics market that has undergone shortages earlier than. Like the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s again, it simply strains the system additional — and if not in shortages of GPU silicon, than the accompanying video RAM.

In a report issued Tuesday. GPU analyst Jon Peddie Research discovered that PC GPU shipments dropped 1.3 % from final quarter, uncommon when the fourth quarter is often the excessive level of the 12 months. GPUs offered into knowledge facilities, nevertheless, climbed 17 %.

JPR additionally discovered that the GPU connect charge for PCs fell to 116 %, down 3.9 % sequentially. (The connect charge refers back to the variety of GPUs offered per PC. In this case, a PC might have two GPUs — an built-in chip in addition to a discrete graphics card, growing the general proportion.)

Sadly, pivoting away from the PC is smart

Anyone who isn’t Nvidia has some robust decisions to make.

Intel made a robust displaying in its Core Ultra Series 3 (Panther Lake) pocket book GPUs, however the market has regularly puzzled when Intel would carry its “Big Battlemage” structure to market as a desktop graphics card. While it surfaced final 12 months, the most recent report from Videocardz now positions the Intel B70 within the context of an LLM packaged stack for working and benchmarking LLM efficiency on its multi-GPU Arc platform. (The reference has since been faraway from the Intel web page.)

The implication is that Intel could also be stealing a web page from AMD’s Radeon AI Pro R9700 card and directing its B70 structure into the AI market, fairly than pushing pixels on the PC.

Pivoting between a desktop gaming GPU and one particularly designed for the workstation isn’t that troublesome, comparatively. They can each use the identical fundamental silicon platform, however differ in each the connected reminiscence in addition to the driving force software program. Workstations use what are often known as licensed drivers written particularly by an Autodesk or a Siemens for a selected card, whereas Windows will use Microsoft’s DirectX API, defined JPA principal Jon Peddie in an interview.

“What I think is going on is that these guys are trying to tiptoe into the market, but maybe don’t have quite the [AI] capability that Nvidia has on their machines and that AMD has in their Instinct [data center] stuff,” Peddie stated. “And so they’re saying this is kind of like a little brother AI GPU. That’s the way I see it playing out.”

And why wouldn’t they? Workstation-class playing cards sometimes promote for about 3 times of a desktop graphics card; present costs of an Nvidia RTX 5090 run (gulp) $3,699 on Newegg, however new RTX Pro 6000 playing cards with 96GB of GDDR7 reminiscence are promoting for about $9,000 on eBay. If AMD or Intel had been in a position to swap out PC graphics playing cards for these varieties of costs in workstations, you possibly can argue that they’d be silly to not. (A workstation card can be utilized by a typical desktop PC, however sometimes isn’t — its drivers aren’t optimized for gaming.)

It’s probably not concerning the numbers. The variety of workstations offered yearly is tiny — 7 million or so — versus the 280 million PCs that had been offered in 2025. Datacenter GPUs choose high-bandwidth reminiscence, or HBM, but it surely’s the reminiscence that’s the concern. Graphics playing cards for each the PC and workstation sometimes use some taste of GDDR reminiscence. (Workstations can also add error-correcting or ECC logic to forestall crashes of important purposes.) But workstations additionally snap up extra of that reminiscence, too: between 32 and 48GB of reminiscence versus the 12 to 24GB of reminiscence {that a} shopper card makes use of.

All this implies is that any shift away from the PC will seemingly pressure the provision of PC graphics-card reminiscence additional. And the conclusion will not be one you’ll need to hear.

“The signals we’re getting from the suppliers and the geopolitical things that are going on is that we see that there is just going to be no availability, period,” Peddie stated. “The availability goes to be very restricted, and in order that, in flip, is simply going to push folks to cease buying. So when you had been going to go refresh your PC or your graphics board, even in 2026, now you’re going to go, ‘maybe not.’

“The price just went up by 50 percent — I don’t need it that badly, right?” Peddie added. “It’s a nice to have, but it’s not a must have. I’ll just wait this out until the prices come back down — which is going to devastate PC and graphics board sales for the consumer.”