[JepZ]

Well, yeah that is a problem. Does anybody here have an idea how that could be solved?

I mean if the firmware would be released with its source everybody could buy the cheap version and load the full-featured firmware version to their hardware. Even if the manufacturer would place some kind of memory on the hardware which holds the feature-level, someone could patch the firmware to ignore that value.

[korethr]

There probably could still be some market segmentation based on the results of what comes out of the silicon fab. Recall that in the case of CPUs, the circuits on dies of processors from the same line (and different lines!) are the same, but some sections are disabled (blown fuses, cut traces, etc) because those sub-sections didn't make the grade during testing prior to packaging. I've not looked, but I'd not be surprised if that weren't also the case with GPUs as well. Sure, you can enable the extra sections of $mid_range_GPU to make it on-paper-equivalent to $top_shelf_GPU, but it's on you to meet its now-unreasonable power and cooling requirements.