I’m sure market segmentation was part of the decision. I talked to a high up person at Nvidia about their general strategy around gaming. Nvidia sells graphics

I’m sure market segmentation was part of the decision. I talked to a high up person at Nvidia about their general strategy around gaming. Nvidia sells graphics cards by having the absolute best graphics performance for gaming. This isn’t purely about raw compute power. There are lots of graphics extensions and features available to game developers on Nvidia that aren’t available elsewhere. If game developers use these extensions, they get a better looking game when played on Nvidia hardware. This comes with a cost, however; it’s more work to use these extra rendering features when developing a game. If gamers can’t buy Nvidia GPUs, then there isn’t a reason for game developers to use Nvidia’s proprietary features. If game developers don’t use the proprietary features, then games don’t look that much better on an Nvidia card. This makes Nvidia a less desirable choice for gamers.