It’s second-hand info so take it with a grain of salt, but I read somewhere that there was a lot of friction between Apple and Nvidia because Apple likes to tweak and tailor drivers per model of Mac and generally not be wholly dependent on third parties for driver changes, but that requires driver source access which Nvidia didn’t like (even though they agreed to it for quite some time — drivers for a range of Nvidia cards shipped with OS X for many years and those were all Apple-tweaked).
That's a nice little story until you find out that "unreasonable" in this case meant "nVidia didn't buy back units EVGA overstocked on with hopes of scalping people in the crypto-craze and refused to take the loss for EVGA".
I think EVGA’s withdrawal had to do with how impossible it was to compete with Nvidia’s first-party cards with the terms Nvidia was setting for AIBs. Other card makers like Asus have several other flagship product lines to be able to sustain the hit while EVGA’s other products consisted of lower-profit accessories.
They may have seen AMD selling their own first-party cards and anticipated AMD eventually following Nvidia’s footsteps. As for Intel, at that point they were probably seen as too much of a gamble to invest in (and probably still are, to a lesser extent).
Because GPUs tend to be low margin to begin with. Nvidia putting all these restrictions on them meant running at a loss.
This compares with PSUs which apparently have a massive margin.
EVGA might come back to the GPU manufacturing space with AMD eventually but Sapphire and Powercolor already fill the niche that EVGA filled for Nvidia cards (high build quality, enthusiast focused, top of the line customer support, warranty, and repairs). So it probably was just not worth picking that fight when the margins aren't really there and AMD is already often seen as "the budget option".
If AMD manages to pull a zen style recovery in the GPU segment, I would expect a decent chance of EVGA joining them as a board partner.
The friction between Linux wanting all drivers to be open source and Nvidia not wanting to open source their drivers isn't really relevant to any other platform besides Linux. Console manufacturers have no reason to care that Nvidia's drivers aren't open source, they can get documentation and/or source code under NDA if they choose to partner with Nvidia. Secrecy comes with the territory.
Its not about open sourcing their drivers. Its about providing ANY drivers for their hardware. Also note that this was from 2012. Nowadays, they actually do provide decent closed-source drivers for Linux.
