AMD Pledges ‘Freedom of Choice’ In Response to NVIDIA GPP

Freedom of Choice for Gamers

NVIDIA‘s GeForce Partnership Program has been controversial since its launch. Many in the industry, including AMD see NVIDIA’s move as a strong-arm tactic to force competition away. While the program itself is not a requirement for NVIDIA GeForce Add-in Board partners, its membership essentially forces then to hand over existing gaming brand alignment exclusively to NVIDIA. Which in itself contradicts NVIDIA’s statement on their own blog post claiming non-exclusivity in the program. In usual marketing spiel, they argue that this is strictly for the benefit and promotion of their partner brands via NVIDIA’s website and social media platforms.

What is AMD Promising?

Now AMD is officially responding to this program by declaring a pledge to reignite and maintain the freedom of choice for gamers. Radeon RX graphics card partners will are not boxed into choosing proprietary solutions. They are pledging no bundling of “gamer taxes” and a commitment to true transparency through industry standards. AMD has actually been doing this for a while now, supporting open innovation standards over proprietary tech. However, it is now codified under this statement.

Furthermore, AMD promises that there are no anti-gamer or anti-competitive strings with their partnerships. While creating open and free game development technologies across all platforms.

They point to the recent adoption of FreeSync on TVs for Xbox One S and Xbox One X. Another example would be the integration of forward looking “Vega” architecture features in Far Cry 5 without performance penalties for the competition. The Vulkan API which has Radeon support is also open source, allowing for developers to adopt it freely.

AMD partners such as ASUS have begun announcing their Radeon partner AREZ-brand graphics cards. The company claims that more partner announcements will also follow soon with new brands over the coming weeks as well. Showing that NVIDIA’s GPP efforts will not dissuade them and their partners.