I don't think I need to explain this sentiment, do I?
I used delight in value for the consumer, progress of technology, more people on low incomes being able to access computing power for projects, etc. Lower cost components were always going to allow more accessibility across the market for adoption of new technology and driving progress forward.
That all changed when the mining crap hit, and then retailers and chip makers realised that idiot gamers were dumb enough to pay inflated, scalped prices from the get-go. AMD was so quick to turn from being the "bastion of the consumer" they had appealed to be when they were weak, with amazing value cards like the RX 570, enabling HD high settings PC gaming for so many people on a tight budget, to having the audacity to release a GP108-tier GPU for 200 USD, lacking basic features such as AVC/HEVC encoding, etc.
I wouldn't even complain too much about the 4x PCI-E connection ot 64-bit bus, as these are not an issue if the performance isn't affected too much (gen3 4x will hurt it if it runs out of VRAM, but GDDR6 provides enough data rate over 64b to not be an issue with the RDNA2 architecture and on-chip 16MB L3 cache), but the lack of encoding hardware is just a piss in the face for me.
It's clearly a cost optimised GPU designed to provide display outputs in OEM machines, not for gaming - for that you'd have encoders as part of the feature set. It's just they packed enough WGPs into the damn thing to make it somewhat OK in compute to drive games at a similar performance level to the ancient RX 580, and are charging about the same for it, with half the VRAM - 5 years later.
I know the market is ripe for milking and AMD is a company, not a charity. That said, I don't have to like it, and starting with the Zen3 price increase, the lack of deals on Zen2 and the absurd pricing of RDNA2 (except 6800XT, but that was a bait and switch price, never reality), AMD is no longer a company that I feel "cares" about the consumer, and honestly, I was likely naive for believing in any capacity that they did to start with. Money is money. They're all the same.
I won't be buying computer components for gaming ever again at this rate. PC gaming is becoming a milk-fest way to sell shit-binned processors to dumbass gamers that don't make the cut for ultra-high margin server/professional parts. But then, wasn't it always?
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