Who makes GPUs besides Nvidia and AMD?

When you think of graphics cards, the first name that comes to mind is probably Nvidia. The company accounts for a massive share of America’s 401(k) and stock portfolios with a market cap in the billions – and it’s also virtually the only game in town, snagging around 95% share of the current GPU market. AMD and its Radeon GPUs are overshadowed (but not forgotten). They’re available as discrete cards, of course, but they’ve also found great success as integrated GPUs in all sorts of computing surfaces, including mini PCs, handheld consoles, and laptops.

After second place comes the rest of the peloton. And they really are the rest. Intel GPUs produce decent power for the price, but the Arc division has never been a stable business. Chinese newcomer Moore Threads might have something competitive to offer down the line, but it doesn’t yet. Apple, Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Arm all also design their own chips, but because they are proprietary on one level or another, they are functionally excluded from being part of the discrete card market in the consumer market. The truth, however, is that the party barely has room for two.

Intel’s second-generation Battlemage cards have been praised for their low prices and the relatively generous specifications they sport compared to comparable AMD and Nvidia cards. The consumer Arc B580 and B570 aren’t the only Intel cards to have fans, and some buyers have opted for the company’s new Arc Pro cards, aimed at workstations aimed at technical and creative professionals.

That said, Arc’s effort has been troubled by some delays in its 2022 launch, and Intel’s earlier attempt to enter the GPU market with its Larrabee line – a true discrete GPU failure – has also been plagued by delays, performance issues and outright cancellation. Even after Arc GPUs finally shipped, they had to receive over a year of driver updates to get decent performance across a satisfactory range of titles. To make matters worse, these cards shipped in some of the weakest GPU market conditions since 2005, which happened in part because of the COVID-era crypto mining craze.

Speculation about Arc’s demise has existed since the beginning, but Intel’s Arc line has been booming since Nvidia’s $5 billion investment in Intel in 2025. Nvidia, however, has allocated those funds for Intel to develop new processors with integrated RTX GPUs, which could potentially replace Intel’s own integrated GPUs, such as the Arc 130 and 140. Although the company has insisted it would continue to offer Arc products, the current install base does not. still seem totally convinced. For example, in a Reddit thread on r/IntelArc, Alchemist users expressed concerns about the lack of optimization in games running on newer engines.

Technically, “chip makers” don’t actually make the chips they design. This work is left to the foundries of companies like TSMC and Samsung. You may have noticed that many GeForce and Radeon cards aren’t branded by Nvidia or AMD at all, but instead are associated with brands like ASRock, Gigabyte, and Sparkle. That’s because these companies, known as “board partners,” take chips, place them on circuit boards with memory and other components, put them on cooling stacks, and enclose it all in a chassis. You may also remember EVGA as a leading producer, before shutting down its graphics card business after its relationship with Nvidia deteriorated.

Apple designs its own GPUs, but they are an integral part of the chipsets they sit on, which typically remain integrated into their original computers. Many mobile devices and some laptops have integrated GPUs from Qualcomm or MediaTek. The latter uses reference designs from Arm, a leading mobile chip designer, while the former uses its own custom blueprints. Samsung uses AMD’s RDNA graphics architecture in its Exynos mobile chipsets. Since these brands are focused on creating chipsets integrated into mobile devices, which differ in design and form factors from dedicated GPUs, they are unlikely to make desktop cards anytime soon.

Then there’s Moore Threads from China, which took root in 2020 and released its first consumer card in 2022. The MTT S80, which was designed for a domestic audience, didn’t support DirectX11 until 2023, and only gained DirectX12 support with a beta driver update in 2024. The card is only compatible with a handful of games, and a recent comparative analysis from a TechPowerUp forum moderator shows that it is struggling. to compete with current generation cards.

Nvidia has held a majority share of graphics card shipments since 2006. As the second largest player in the market, AMD held a respectable share of the market until the mid-2010s, following aggressive competition from Nvidia. Today, AMD has less than 10% market share, but it has also progressed against long-dominant Intel in the processor race. However, Team Green’s dominance has less to do with gaming or even graphics than ever before, and the role of artificial intelligence, data centers, and crypto mining in its revenue stream predates the global pandemic. The SEC even fined Nvidia in 2018 for misleading investors by misrepresenting miners’ demand as gamers’ demand.

Nvidia’s dominance was largely made possible thanks to its Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). Introduced in 2006, CUDA makes it possible to use an Nvidia GPU and its associated lightning-fast infrastructure with any type of code, not just for shaders or plotting in games. The architecture was even useful in large-scale simulations at NASA and other academic efforts, and it also proved to be a huge benefit to Bitcoin and Ethereum enthusiasts who were using their GPUs to mine cryptocurrencies, not just to play games. AMD pushed the Radeon Open Compute (ROCm) platform for its own graphics cards in 2016, but the standard requires more technical knowledge and generates less productivity overall than CUDA, and there is little evidence that ROCm has contributed much to Radeon card sales.