[oliwarner]

If it means people who only want to play games can actually but one for less than the price of a car, sure.

Hardware manufacturers have imposed weird arbitrary feature limits on things forever. It's how they segment out valuable markets. Even in graphics you get output limits to protect workstation cards. Nothing new.

[ttt0]

I kinda get the segmentation part, at least in theory, but I don't buy that it's to "protect the poor gamers". Maybe I'm missing something, but the production cost is the same and it costs virtually nothing to not put on those limits. If anything, it almost certainly costs more to do this. So as far as I understand it, it's just charging more money for what essentially is the same thing. Especially when you consider the fact that they simultaneously changed the license of one of their cheaper GPU cards to prevent using it in data centers, so you'd have to switch to something more expensive. What's important to note is that they specifically didn't prevent the blockchain stuff.

I don't know, I just find producing something and then breaking it to be wasteful and borderline immoral.

[oliwarner]

The primary supply is limited by covid affecting the component supply chain. The demand is sky high because of miners happy still making s profit at twice the price. The cards are often going straight from primary retailers to eBay.

Lots of factors colluding to make PC gaming unaffordable.