3. Improve the relationship between NVIDIA and the open-source community.
If AMD was both much better on Linux (due to #2/#3), and they were "good enough" for a substantial portion of users who're now using SteamOS, that's a lot of lost revenue for NVIDIA.
Too bad as the target audience of Steam on Linux (mainly, a hacker who also plays games, and doesn't buy Windows licenses) I can't go with either companies products.
Nvidia is direly amoral in their completely asinine hatred of FOSS and their inability to contribute. I won't support a business with that mentality. They either grow up and play ball in mesa or I don't give them a cent.
But AMD has terrible performance and instability in both drivers, and they still have proprietary firmware. It is like trying to have ones cake and eat it too - "hey look, we have foss drivers, except not!" is not good enough. The whole point of foss drivers is not hiding anything from users, and having binary firmware blobs making their devices impossible to reimplement without reverse engineering defeats the purpose.
Then there is Intel, who just makes a foss driver as their only option and does it right. So my next build is using 4600 HD graphics and I'll just play minecraft and quake live rather than whatever shiny new shooter Valve brings to Linux.
3. Improve the relationship between NVIDIA and the open-source community.
If AMD was both much better on Linux (due to #2/#3), and they were "good enough" for a substantial portion of users who're now using SteamOS, that's a lot of lost revenue for NVIDIA.