>When you buy a piece of SW that has free features but requires a license key to unlock advanced features, everything is fine, but the moment HW is involved all

>When you buy a piece of SW that has free features but requires a license key to unlock advanced features, everything is fine, but the moment HW is involved all of that flies out of the window. This doesn't make sense at all. In your scenario you always pay for what you get. and developing additional features has a non-zero cost asociated with it (Unless you download software which targets unskilled consumers, Like Chessbase's Fritz engine which was essentially stockfish but 100$ instead of 0) >Extra features cost money to implement. Companies want to be paid for it. This doesn't make sense in your scenario either. You already have the sillicon with the 'advanced features' in your hands. The reason they lock the feature is so that you have to buy a more expensive card, with overpowered hardware that you dont need, in order to use a feature that all cards have if it weren't disabled. The only reasonable explanation you could have at this point that doesn't involve monopolistic practices to make more money (Nothing wrong with that) is that the development of the feature itself was so prohibitively expensive that it required consumers to pay for much higher margin cards in order to offset the development costs. Which is what's happening >A company like Nvidia could decide to make 2 pieces of silicon, one with professional features and once without. Or they could disable it. That would cost alot of money. all the more reasons why it might have been done to upsell more cards instead of offering quantitative improvements for a different price.