I think this makes more sense when read together with the announcement that they are moving to unify their compute and consumer graphics architectures.
His comments about this catering to developers also make more sense in that light.
If this means more affordable mid-range GPUs, I’m all for it. Very few people can afford 4090s anyway and competing in this space gives you nothing but bragging rights.
Sounds like their strategy from 10 years ago.
“We can’t compete”
So they are going with the “if you want cheap, buy AMD or if you want fast buy Nvidia” approach. That will work out well for them, not.
It is more of a “For typical cards, expect very competitive options from AMD. If you want top performance, buy Nvidia.”
In theory it allows them to focus more on the cards that actually get bought, and thus they could make those cards better products.
As much as that sounds right the marketing fails. For general consumers the 7900 xtx competes with the 4090 right? The 6900 and 3090 did so it must now too. So they see benchmarks and see the 4090 performance difference and see that it is closer to the 4080. You might start assuming a 4060 is roughly in line with a 7700 and the 4060 is $100(US) cheaper without doing the full research.
In other words, they will find a way to screw it up.
It sounds like they simply aren’t making an 8900.
