[edit] Fixed Quote. Ooops.
True. I think it was Silent_Buddha who mentioned that someone he knew had "upgraded" from an HD 5870 to a 6870. So maybe the GT510 -> GT610 upgrade isn't all that far-fetched after all.
Yes, I have had friends, clients, and former clients do this. That's why I was particular unhappy with AMD when they shuffled things around. It just made my life a whole lot more complicated when I had to explain to friends and clients that what they thought was an upgrade was actually a slight downgrade in terms of performance.
I've had the exact same problem with Nvidia hardware for years with friends and clients. It's a royal PITA. It isn't so bad if the performance does improve in general.
However, even there things go wonky. As rebrands often lack the new features in current gen silicon. Video decode, for example, in past cards.
Having to explain that while the card they just bought to replace their previous card might be faster but lacks the features they expected from the new "generation" of cards as indicted by the first number of each generation of cards (Xyy or Xyyy depending on company) is a royal PITA.
For some people it doesn't bother them. They either live with it or return it and get something else. For others they get angry at being deceived and switch to the other brand for a while. And then the other brand does rebranding and they get angry and switch back, etc. And then there's some that just don't care or don't notice.
Most of these people are just normal people that are either casual computer users who like games or semi-serious gamers that just don't want to keep up with the latest hardware news. In the latter case they are more likely to have an idea of the new "features" of the enthusiast cards (since those come out first and people talk about them) and just figure those features will also exist in cards lower down the performance chain with the same generational number.
I'm sure enthusiasts won't be fooled by the rebranding and can choose accordingly. But enthusiasts typically don't need my services or advice, so all my experience is with general run of the mill consumers who often don't know better but know just enough to pepper me with questions about this or that.
Meh...
Regards,
SB