Consumer & gaming GPUs
GeForce, Radeon and Arc cards sitting in gaming PCs — the same tensor cores as the datacenter parts, in smaller quantity, distributed across a third of a billion desks. This is the pool that mined Ethereum, and it remains the world's largest reserve of idle general-purpose parallel compute.
Consumer & gaming GPUs over time
Installed compute in zettaFLOP/s, log scale, 2008 → present. A straight line on this axis means steady exponential growth; the slope is the doubling rate. History before the 2026 anchor is reconstructed — see the methodology.
~250M discrete GPUs x ~60 TFLOP/s dense FP16, weighted over the Steam Hardware Survey.
~250 million discrete cards: desktop add-in-board installed base ~180M (Jon Peddie Research) plus laptop discrete. Per-device is a WEIGHTED AVERAGE over the 85 discrete models in the July 2026 Steam Hardware Survey at dense FP16 — 74.2 TFLOP/s — haircut to 60 for the non-gaming tail Steam under-samples and for its old-skewed 8.7 percent Other bucket. The most common card, an RTX 3060, is 51 TFLOP/s; an RTX 4090 is 330.
Overlap treatment: Discrete add-in cards in client machines. Datacenter GPUs are the AI-accelerator lines; integrated graphics is in the personal-computer line.
Growth: compounding at 1.12× a year (73.4-month doubling) between published vintages.