Last year AMD took the lead in DirectX 11 competition by releasing the Radeon HD 5000 series graphics cards. The red camp managed to pass NVIDIA in graphics chip shipments in the second quarter, according to the research company Mercury Research.

ATI graphics chips grabbed 51% of the discrete graphics chip market, while NVIDIA’s share was just 49%. Ironically, in the same period a year ago NVIDIA had about 59% of the market and AMD had just under 41%.

Intel still topped the total market with a 54.3% share, AMD follows with 24.5%, and NVIDIA with 19.8%. In the 2nd quarter of last year, NVIDIA held a 29.6% share compared to AMD’s 18.2%.

Hopefully the GeForce GTX 460 is supposed to help NVIDIA to regain some market shares in the next quarter.