Not the brightest move by AMD if they want to gain the trust of gamers. They should be happy that gamers are considering their lower end cards at all, but it will definitely backfire when their customers find out they didn't get what they thought they were getting. That is something to make someone not want to buy AMD ever again.
Then again, gamers have been treating AMD like garbage for years. The market has had a bias for a long time. Think of it this way. We all know how the Xbox is doing in Japan. It has gone so far that MS practically gave up on it. They tried releasing JRPGs on their consoles for example to sell them in the past, and it didn't work. Nothing they did, helped them gain market share over there, and there really is no good reason for it other than the mindshare of the population.
It's the same in the GPU space. The gaming market is like Japan for AMD. They have really tried for a long time (much longer than MS in Japan), but they are not valued. And well, if they can make a quick buck in the meantime, which they desperately need, by being able to ship and potentially sell chips that couldn't be sold at that price otherwise, they are going to do it. It's not as if their targeted consumer base had their backs anyway.
Is it wrong? Yes. But it's not as if their reputation can get much worse either. Their reputation of being a hotter, slower, more power hungry budget alternative with crappy drivers, bad coolers, inferior technology and second tier features & support, which ultimately is not budgetary anyway because you need a bigger power supply and better cooling and bigger case and more case fans while missing out on the awesome competitor logos and brand name and GameWorks and premium features like G-sync, precedes them.
At the same time, nobody goes to the length of not buying nVidia ever again when they do similar nonsense (except for me apparently). GTX 970 3.5GB, GTX 1060 3GB, Fermi clock speeds, 860M, Geforce 2 MX, the list goes on and on. Sure, they are called out on it, but what then? Calling out is useless by itself, if what they get in their pockets is not consistent with the situation. And that's where the responsibility of the consumer comes in. But we're not mature enough for that (yet). Because one felt it in their pockets whether they did good or bad, and the other was getting their pockets filled whether they did good or bad. So... Yeah.
And suddenly over there, there's a much better market, which are the miners. In the light of the recent 'mining driver', AMD seems to be adopting a 'screw gamers, welcome miners' attitude, and I don't blame them. At least miners buy their products when they are a good deal, rather than constantly whining about AMD and bashing them.
Is this anti-consumer? Yes.
Is it worse than nVidia's past examples? No.
Is it better? No.
I'm not defending this action, but honestly, I don't care anymore. Gamers are generally too busy having nerdgasms at every other nVidia product to know what's really important for the future. They only care about bragging rights and the here and now.
Keep getting screwed over. Maybe someday we'll be mature enough to know what matters.
