Gentlemen, the Microtransaction upgrade system has escaped the realm of MMOs and has begun to infect the marketplace.

Flee for your lives.

Imaginative troll, I give you that.

Never liked DLC. Generally if you buy DLC you just encourage shit like this to happen.

When they first start producing a chip, chip quality will vary. Some will perform well, some will perform sorta okay, and some will perform poorly. The ones that perform well are packaged as high end chips, the rest have the malfunctioning sections restricted and are sold as mid/low end chips.

After they've been making the chips for a while, they have the bugs worked out of the process and all the chips that come off the production line are high quality. Instead of discontinuing every line of chips but the highest, they keep locking off cores on functional chips and continue to sell them as low-end chips. These cards are the difference in price between the fully functional chips and the locked chips.

And there you go, that's why this happened.