For a company that's running of fumes, it makes much more sense to have a figurehead blab stuff to the press than to spend money on R&D against a competitor against whom they have no chance of winning in the short or medium term.
And unlike the "over clockers dream" case, it has the benefit that it's really very hard to disprove something that isn't there.
If I were an AMD guy, it'd do just the same. The target audience eats it up anyway.
Sure, if by spend money on R&D you mean spend money to put developers behind NDA walls that prevent them from discussing with Nvidia's competitors what the gamework'ss code being used in their game actually does or how it works or why performance tanks on competitor's hardware, then yes.
But that only works when you basically have market dominance and can dictate to developers what they need to do to have your support as the majority of their market uses that IHVs hardware. AMD doesn't have the option to lock developers behind an NDA paywall as not only do they have less cash, but they also have less market presence.
So, yes, unlike Nvidia, AMD doesn't have as much power to have developers put in features that quite likely will run significantly worse on the competition's hardware even though that would likely not be the case if it wasn't locked behind an NDA. BTW - by forced, I don't mean via threat or actual force. But by offering such a compelling package (plug and play features that require [supposedly] little to no effort by the developer to implement) that developers will be attracted to using it as a money/development time saving tool that upper management will insist they use it whether it is beneficial or not.
Also note, this is a relatively new thing. Nvidia in the past used to proved source code for much of their work (similar to AMD) as noted by some developers around the net. But Nvidia saw a way to gain a competitive advantage by making their competition's hardware run on less than optimal code and all the while prevent the competition from seeing said code and offering suggestions to the developers on ways to potentially make it run better on their hardware.
I current run Nvidia hardware and hate Nvidia gameworks because it holds the entire industry back in order to boost profits and marketshare for one company. Note - that as a company this is what Nvidia should be doing. Similar in many ways to how Microsoft/Apple should be bundling their own browsers in their operating systems and making opposing browsers run worse by not giving them access to key information...oops. Sorry they aren't allowed to do that but Nvidia is.
Regards,
SB
