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Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

blogs.nvidia.com

71–80 of 762 posts

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#71
post #21

It'll be interesting to see how long it takes for someone to reverse-engineer the drivers and remove the slowdown code.

Or. Uhm. Use older drivers? I bet these are bios changes though.

The RTX 3060 hasn't released yet, so if the cards ship with this limitation, there aren't any old drivers to use.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#72
In Germany, NVIDIA quotes 519 € as the starting price for the RTX 3070 series. Unfortunately, the cards are sold out almost everywhere and the few sites that accept back-orders list them for almost 1.000 € now, which is crazy. So Kudos to them for doing this, as the crypto craze seems to heat up there's no end in sight for miners buying up GPUs and NVIDIA risks angering a lot of regular people that weren't able to buy a new graphics card for almost 6 months now.

That said I'm not sure how effective this measure will be as in my understanding all that miners need to do in order to circumvent this throttling is avoid downloading the newest NVIDIA drivers (?). In addition, I'm sure miners will quickly come up with a crack that renders the throttling moot, so not sure if this will fix the supply side. Offering specific hardware to miners that doesn't compete with that for gamers seems to be a better solution, but again if NVIDIA isn't able to satisfy the demand for such hardware miners will keep buying regular GPUs and try to circumvent the software throttling.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#73
post #28
post #15

Gamers hate miners, they're driving the price up, make hardware impossible to get ect ... It's a really problematic situation. Almost 6 month after launching new graphic cards from AMD / NVIDIA good luck gettting an RTX 30xx or 6800. On a side note all those virtual currency are just plain wrong on the environment side, it does not make any sense in 2021 to have a currency that need heavy computation thus increasing…

I don't quite get why everyone seems to get onto the environment train with crypto but seem to have had no issues with gold

Warren Buffett, the renowned investor, famously dismissed gold in a speech given at Harvard in 1998. He said: “It gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or some place. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head.”

It sucks that gold is so desired just for its look. If it were cheaper it would be used a lot more for technological devices.

I can't wait until asteroid mining crashes the gold price and hopefully puts an end to the ecological disaster that is gold mining.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#74
post #64

So they’re hamstringing normal cards (to protect gamers of course!) and releasing a “new” card without the hamstring at a higher price and we’re to believe this is simply to protect gamers and not a money grab?

Wouldn't the easy money grab be to just set MSRP for all cards way higher ($5k?) while the demand is ~infinite?

> Wouldn't the easy money grab be to just set MSRP for all cards way higher

But then how do they capture the "just gamers"? They would have to additionally sell a neutered card just for them, and that is exactly what they are doing here

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#75
post #59
post #15

Gamers hate miners, they're driving the price up, make hardware impossible to get ect ... It's a really problematic situation. Almost 6 month after launching new graphic cards from AMD / NVIDIA good luck gettting an RTX 30xx or 6800. On a side note all those virtual currency are just plain wrong on the environment side, it does not make any sense in 2021 to have a currency that need heavy computation thus increasing…

Ethereum has been designed from the very start to switch from PoW (mining) to PoS (validating) and Phase 0 of that transition has already started.

I remember that argument being made 2 years ago during the last mining craze.

Given the existing investment in Ethereum HW, it almost seems like it’s just a carrot to deflect criticism about power consumption, but not something that will actually happen.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#76
post #39
post #15

Gamers hate miners, they're driving the price up, make hardware impossible to get ect ... It's a really problematic situation. Almost 6 month after launching new graphic cards from AMD / NVIDIA good luck gettting an RTX 30xx or 6800. On a side note all those virtual currency are just plain wrong on the environment side, it does not make any sense in 2021 to have a currency that need heavy computation thus increasing…

We did think about it but wanted both the simplest possible consensus model and the widest possible distribution of coins, which led us to Proof of Work (geared to lower-power ASICs) and fixed block reward. Proof of Stake is much more complicated, is subjective, and doesn't provide for coin distribution.

Proof of stake is a solved problem, has a fixed block reward, has no ASICS or need for them, is no more complicated, is not in anyway subjective, and distributes coins just fine as both ADA and XTZ are doing right now.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#77
post #23

It'll be interesting to see how long it takes for someone to reverse-engineer the drivers and remove the slowdown code.

I use CUDA for scientific calculations and I wonder how this will affect GPU performance since any detection algorithm may have fault positives. The only problem with such artificial limitation is that usually people who mine crypto are very inventive (if you have doubts about that just check laptop mining farms [1]), since they try to squeeze out as many H/s as possible. It is just a matter of time when the 'right'…

Honestly if it's an issue they'd probably tell you you're also using their GeForce cards wrong and you need to move up to Quadro.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#78

It'll be interesting to see how long it takes for someone to reverse-engineer the drivers and remove the slowdown code.

They might doing the same thing video games do to combat piracy. No DRM is unbreakable, all games are eventually cracked, so why bother? The thought is that it buys enough time during the critical launch window to sway people who will have pirated the game to buy a copy instead.

The case for this kind of video card "DRM" is actually stronger because miners either have to gamble and buy cards they know they won't be able to use until (or even if) a "crack" is available, or wait until a solution is available before buying them.

If the miners wait, this is a win for gamers and Nvidia PR because the cards will be bought by gamers since cards have a limited supply unlike video game licenses.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why Ethereum is moving to proof-of-stake. Saying that virtual currency is wrong because the biggest currency is unwilling to innovate is wrong.

When?

It's a continuous process that is already in progress and aimed at (mostly) completing in 2022. For what is worth, ETH PoS alternatives are also gaining a lot of ground in the mean time.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#80
post #47

Why not just make a massively parallel ASIC and make the price competitive to the RTX 3060? This would be better than crippling the product via software drivers.

The big draw of gaming cards is their resale value, when they become obsolete for mining they can be resold to gamers for significant fraction of their original price. Truly huge mining operations use ASICs anyway, but for medium sized farms gaming GPUs make more sense.
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