AMD's Scott Herkelman took to pen a blog post regarding AMD's stance in providing choice to the PC gamer. Although his post does not directly mention the controversial NVIDIA GeForce Partner Program, there is enough information in the post to convey that AMD will not take NVIDIA's route in the garb of ensuring a great PC gaming experience.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-pledges-to-respect-the-gamer-s-choice-in-the-wake-of-inconsistencies-in-NVIDIA-s-GeForce-Partner-Program.299468.0.html
This is a pretty transparant attempt by AMD marketing to beat the dead horse that is GPP's reputation among gamers.
However, AMD's recent history with regards to openness is one that can hardly be disputed, and is in stark contrast to the protectionist stance of Nvidia:
- AMD funded the development of Mantle, a close-to-the-metal graphics API to offer an low-overhead alternative to DirectX and OpenGL for game developers. AMD gave all rights related to Mantle to the Khronos group to develop the open, vendor-neutral Vulkan API we have today.
- AMD has consistently supported the vendor-neutral OpenCL standard for GPU computing, whereas Nvidia is holding onto Nvidia-only CUDA and refusing to support OpenCL beyond the vintage 2011 OpenCL version 1.2.
- AMD has chosen to implement FreeSync on top of the open VESA standard AdaptiveSync, making it a royalty and license free endeavor to implement FreeSync for display manufacturers and other GPU makers alike. Meanwhile, Nvidia opted to develop their own, incompatible GSync and demand licensing fees and the exclusion of FreeSync support in order to be allowed to claim GSync compatiblity. Other GPU developers like AMD and Intel cannot build GSync compatible chips, locking gamers into a GPU maker for the lifetime of their display.
- Less relevant for most users, but AMD has for the past 3 generations of their graphics hardware provided excellent open-source Linux drivers that integrate well with the modern Linux graphics stack, while Nvidia continues pushing their old proprietary drivers which conflict with MESA (thus preventing the use of other GPU brands in the same system), and only work with the legacy X11.
- AMD is the only vendor to provide open source low-level GPU debuggers and profilers to developers.