Disagree. You assume NVIDIA controls the rules of the game, but they do not. NVIDIA just happens to invest more in the gaming community. AMD could do the same, but they choose to do very little. Where is the innovation? NVIDIA introduced us to RT. NVIDIA introduced us to variable refresh rates. NVIDIA introduced us to high quality upscaling. What has AMD given us besides cloning the NVIDIA stuff?
That is their problem.
Cloning is a bit overstated. AMD is forced to have a different approach. They have to be 'open'. There is almost 0 reason to add features because they will not be adopted by developers. There is maybe 15% of the market with AMD GPUs and only 10% of those who have the cool new GPU that can use the feature. What developer will implement that feature without a payoff? It only pays if the feature works on competitor's products too. A second player at RTG's inconsequential size does not get to add new features that require developer support. That is always a losing battle.
(Except on consoles - where Radeon did do some weird things like the Xbox 360's tessellator before Nvidia)
Yeah, I'm going to have to agree with Gdansk here... Nvidia's commanding market/mindshare lead offers them an advantage when it comes to market perception. It doesn't matter if AMD does something first because the userbase that would be able to take advantage of it is small so it hinders mass adoption, and then if Nvidia follow suit then everyone just kind of assumes they innovated first because that's when most people know about it. It's like how Apple wasn't the first to introduce wireless charging, always on displays, or even the punch-hole front camera, but a lot of people recognize Apple as the innovator here simply because they get more publicity.
Also, Nvidia investing more into the gaming community is less about helping the community and more about driving sales for future products. Nvidia's biggest competitor isn't AMD; it's themselves. With such a dominant position in the market, to sustain long-term revenue they need to convince the majority of their user base to upgrade as often as possible. If RT didn't exist, we'd all eventually settle for a GPU that does 4K comfortably and then Nvidia annual sales would fall because we'd hit the point of diminishing returns, not unlike how smartphones have gotten so competent and expensive that it's silly to upgrade on an annual basis. RT and DLSS were created to solve this exact long-term problem that Nvidia faces. Nvidia will continue to fund and sponsor game developers to use their proprietary technologies because it guarantees a market for their GPUs. Again, the goal here is to convince customers to buy future Nvidia GPUs.
Until AMD get a sizeable portion of the marketshare (>30%), they can only really just follow what Nvidia does and hope to do it better because they are not in the driver's seat. As history has shown, whenever AMD catch up to Nvidia in something, Nvidia marketing just comes up with something else to differentiate their product not just from the competition but also from their older GPUs, typically in the form of something exclusive to the upcoming generation of GPUs.