According to new figures, AMD has overtaken Nvidia for graphics chip shipments. The numbers from Mercury Research show that in the second quarter of 2010 AMD’s ATI graphics unit took 51% of the standalone, or ‘discrete’ graphics chip market compared to Nvidia’s share of almost 49%.

A good 12 months for AMD evidently.

Mercury Research tracks graphics chip shipments globally, and when looking at their figures from this time last year it shows that AMD has boosted its share of the market greatly over 12 months. At the same point in 2009 Nvidia had about 59% of sales and AMD just under 41%.

As TechRadar reports, AMD revealed last month that it had shipped 16 million DX11 cards in the past nine months and the company’s successful 5800 series “tapped into the latest DirectX11 technology offered by Microsoft Windows 7 and has reaped the benefits of getting to market first”.

Meanwhile CNet notes that Nvidia had yesterday warned investors that revenue would fall short of earlier projections, with that news coming a day after Apple moved its iMac and Mac Pro lines to AMD graphics chips, dropping Nvidia.