Quote:bribe game developers to optimise software for them.
Oh here we go.
I assume you're referring to the "the way it's meant to be played" marketing campaign?
Nvidia does not bribe game developers, they help them. In exchange for some free marketing nvidia will send over some engineers and graphics artists to help you develop your graphics engine. They spend millions of dollars on this program every year, they expect to get something from it. Since their employees are extremely familiar with their architectures and use their dev tools of course these games are going to be well optimized for nvidia cards. A lot of crossplatform games wouldn't have a PC version if it wasn't for this program (most of the games fall into this category, they work heavily with devs to get console games ported to the PC). And a lot of PC exclusives wouldn't have been developed if it wasn't for this program. Yet they get so much bad PR for doing this it's unbelievable. Helping PC game developers? Who wants that right? Certainly not PC gamers no sir.
Nvidia also provides some very nice dev tools and profilers for free that are designed for their cards. Developers that use these tools will likely have a graphics engine that is very well optimized for nvidia cards as a result.
They do a lot to help game developers out and most of what they do tends to favor their hardware (why spend money on optimizing your products to work better with the competitors hardware? If the competitor wants to compete it's their responsibility to provide the same things) but they do not bribe them. And many of the games that do run better on nvidia cards aren't part of the "the way it's meant to be played" program.
I love how people accused nvidia of bribing crytek to optimize their game for nvidia cards yet benchmarks clearly show that it runs better on comparable AMD cards. It's one of the most AMD leaning games in existence! But oh no, it's got that dreaded "the way it's meant to be played" logo on it so it must have been deliberately designed to run better on nvidia cards.
The fact of the matter is most AAA games are extremely well optimized for both. And the nvidia:AMD performance ratio is so similar among most of them that it's extremely hard to point to specific titles and say "that one is optimized for nvidia while this other one is optimized for AMD". I could also point out that like the above example a lot of the "the way it's meant to be played" games run better on AMD hardware, which proves that they were properly optimized for both. In fact the majority of these games either perform the same or better on comparable amd cards despite the branding.
And then there are low/medium budget developers which tend to avoid extreme optimization altogether. And in that case things just happen to run better on certain hardware. Dolphin is a good example of this.
And then there are the hardware advantages that just can't be ignored. For example BF3 runs fairly similarly on AMD and nvidia cards with most settings. However crank up the AA and resolution and it begins to favor nvidia cards by a sizable margin. This is because most of the high end nvidia cards happen to have better pixel fill rates than the comparable AMD cards. There is really nothing EA DICE can do to make those cards perform similarly with those settings. Sometimes what you're doing just happens to favor a particular hardware architecture/configuration.
There are so few AAA games that run significantly better on nvidia hardware that one has to logically conclude that most games are either heavily optimized for both or neither. I don't know where this idea that if a game runs slightly better on nvidia cards or has the "the way it's meant to be played" logo on it the developer must have been bribed came from but I've gotten really sick of it over the last decade. There are plenty of other reasons why a game might run better on nvidia cards.
TL: DR: They don't bribe game developers, although they do help some of them. In most cases this doesn't seem to result in a game that favors their products though. There are other reasons why X game might run a little bit faster on X GPU.
